[PLEASE ENQUIRE FOR A FULL DESCRIPTION]
Very rare - only two other copies known of this edition: one at the Wellcome Library (bound with a copy of the 1788 edition - acquired in 2015 from a UK dealer) and one at Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (part of the collection of Franz von Krenner (1762-1819) acquired by the library in 1819). First published in April 1760 (this date is usually mistakenly given as 1757) and almost annually thereafter - all surviving editions of Harris’s List are very rare and survive in no more than one or two copies for each year, when they survive at all.
A remarkably well preserved copy of one of the most notorious and scandalous books in British publishing history. Harris’s List was a long-running annual directory listing sex workers in and around London’s Covent Garden and the West End. Over eighty women are included in the present edition with descriptions of their appearance, character, cost and location described in poetic language which extolls the virtues and beauty of the women as well as their supposed shortcomings There is also information on how to find the women and how much they charge.
As well as being a practical handbook for men soliciting sex, the List was also a piece of erotic literature in its own right - back issues were regularly advertised as available for purchase and the book contains a lengthy florid introduction in praise of prostitution. Each entry is headed with a poetic extract before a prose description which is often elaborate and full of knowing allusions and asides.
Harris’s List has been examined in Hallie Rubenhold’s popular book The Covent Garden Ladies (first published in 2005) and (much needed) bibliographical work was begun by Janet Ing Freeman (in 2012) and continued by Nicola Parsons and Amelia Dale (in 2022) but the scarcity of the book itself has remained a barrier towards a full assessment of one of the central texts for the study of the history of erotic literature, the explosion of the sex trade in 18th-century London and the publishing of contraband books in the period.
The name of the author “Harris” and the publisher “H. Ranger” are pseudonymous and still largely untraced and most likely cover-all names for a variety of writers, compliers, editors, publishers and booksellers. This famous rarity still conceals and promises much more information on the scurrilous underground world of the 18th-century publishing industry and the London sex trade in general.
Despite its annual 34 year publishing history almost half of the editions are unrecorded and untraced. Of the copies which do survive most exist in only a very small number of copies for each year. The present copy is only the fifth known copy of any edition of Harris’s List to survive in the original paper wrappers exactly as it would have on (or under) a bookseller’s counter over 200 years ago.
