Modern times didn't invent the sex manual

Every generation thinks it has invented what people have been doing since people were people, including sex.

I tend not to keep books, but if I were to travel to California's International Antiquarian Book Fair to buy this at auction, I would keep it. I neither want to make the trip nor do I have $65,000 if I wanted to bid by phone.

A first edition Aristoteles Master-Piece (it is neither by him or a masterpiece)  is a sex manual from the 17th-century.

It belies the myth that our ancestors were prudes and gives advise on:

• Getting the child of the sex wanted
• Conception
• Pregnancy
• Birth
• Problems
• Wanton behavior
• Foreplay
• Witchcraft (ok, that's not in modern manuals)

The book was mentioned in James Joyce’s Ulysses, which of course, I didn't find, because after at least ten attempts to read it, I will be able to put on my gravestone, "She was never able to read more than 25-pages of Ulysses.

I don't want it because it is a sex manual, but for its historic value to match the two or three antique books I already know. I want to imagine who read it over the centuries and what their lives were like in and out of bed.