Ueber die heimlichen Sünden der Jugend.
Frankfurt und Leipzig: n. p., 1786. Evident third edition, perhaps a piracy, published a year after the Crusius first. 8vo (6.75 x 4.38 pages), somewhat later quarter cloth and drab boards, [2], 341, [1] pages in blackletter type. Title page ornament. A little tender in the gutter in a few spots; some light wear, rubbing and occasional light foxing; in very good condition. Item #22487
First published in 1785 by Crusius and followed by a Vienna edition the same year, with this Frankfurt und Leipzig presumed piracy of 1786 following closely behind. (The title page vignette here is based on the engraving used by Crusius but lacks the delicacy of the original.) A foundational anti-masturbation work from an important German educational reformer, novel for its basis in ample case studies and building on the work of Tissot. (Salzmann had solicited schoolboys for their accounts of the solitary vice.) 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, 530.
Price: $850.00