Ueber die heimlichen Sünden der Jugend.
Leipzig: Siegfried Lebrecht Crusius, 1785. First edition. 8vo (7 x 4.5 inches), presumed original sprinkled boards neatly rebacked in paper with the joints neatly reinforced, [2], 342 pages in an antiqua typeface. Title page vignette. Original boards a bit rubbed; in very good condition. Item #22486
A foundational anti-masturbation work from an important German educational reformer, novel for its basis in ample case studies (Salzmann had solicited schoolboys for their accounts of the solitary vice) and for taking the ideas of Tissot and applying minute analysis to defining the problems created by self-abuse. Salzmann here produces “more than three hundred pages on the topic by accumulating story after story of fallen youth, one more alarming than the next. His influence was wide. One of the founding mothers of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft translated—adapted would be more accurate—his main work” (Laqueur 54). Stengers and Van Neck note “the plural in the title is misleading; masturbation was the only of the ‘sins’ under study” (86). Salzmann’s approach to preventing the practice among students ranges from minute attention to classroom layout and student dress (to avoid covert masturbation during instruction), as well as “three violent diatribes against the toilet” (Stengers and Van Neck 88). References: Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (Zone Books 2003) & Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck (trans. Kathryn A. Hoffmann), Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror (Palgrave 2001). Pfauch & Röder, C. G. Salzmann-bibliographie, 528. Salzmann was curiously absent from the Burton Weiss onanism collection. Early brief ink autograph note dated 1786 to the title page.
Price: $1,250.00