Grafik Novel

Grafik, Issue 166

The cigarette-holed, worn pages of The Joy of Sex were my introduction to sex. It belonged to my dad and, as with many copies of this book at that time, it was tucked away out of sight, its thumbed cover hiding a world of wonders.

It was an ocular adventure, swapping the familiarity of Mowgli in my treasured copy of The Jungle Book with two crayon-rendered bottoms. The awkward words didn’t make sense to me at the time but the engaging drawings were all it took to convey the message.

The Joy of Sex was originally published in 1972. Its author, the doctor and scientist Alex Comfort, created a sexual adventure for the world to share, basing the template of the book on a cookbook offering up an erotic menu. More than one hundred sensitive illustrations by former Penthouse illustrator Christopher Foss and traditional painter Charles Raymond greatly assisted in making the book such a success. Its cover featured the couple illustrated throughout the book – the gentleman, nicknamed ‘Bearded Man’, is now an icon the world over.

The concept of The Joy of Sex captured the mood of a world in a sexual revolution. Despite receiving many written complaints, it sold more than ten million copies before the end of the decade, outselling the Bible, and was the toast of the town. The following year came More Joy of Sex, after which followed other editions and versions including an updated text by Comfort amending his belief in free love to monogamy after the outbreak of AIDS. In 2002 a rather more academic, thirtieth-anniversary edition was released by Comfort’s son Nicholas.

The text has now been reworked again by author and psychologist Susan Quilliam. The New Joy of Sex, “the thinking person’s guide to sex”, will be released this month. “I was in my early twenties when the original Joy of Sex came out. It was such a seminal book that amazed me so much, so when Mitchell Beazley asked me to reinvent it as a woman it was one of those wonderful moments of serendipity,” smiles Quilliam.

Alex Comfort proposed his original, pioneering text to Mitchell Beazley Publishers in the early 1970s as a more intimate take on the sex academia that was available at that time. The fifty-one-year-old doctor and Cambridge graduate had experienced a strict upbringing in the sexually inexperienced 1930s: with his tweed suit, rimmed spectacles and cigar he seemed an unlikely expert on such matters. The publishers were amused by his ideas and by the unfolding sexual encounters between a scientist (Comfort) and a librarian (his mistress, later to be his second wife) that are at the core of the text. Comfort’s original handwritten notebook slowly evolved into a concise manual and the touching guide is now a classic.

“It turned one’s world upside down. We were very worried it would be banned or that we would get into trouble with the press…that we would get typed as a pornographic publisher,” stated Peter Kindersley, art director of The Joy of Sex in a television documentary on the book in 2001.

Finding a way to portray the positions was difficult. To print photographs of a couple was out of the question – it would have been seen as highly pornographic – so the solution was to use illustrations. The answer came in the form of Charles Raymond, who agreed to pose anonymously for the book with his wife, a German model. The photo shoot took place over two days in the winter of 1971, with Chris Foss taking the groundbreaking shots. “I used the camera as a sketchbook, taking pictures I could use to draw from. I had never photographed two people naked, let alone copulating, and it was so difficult to light and illustrate the two bodies as the important bits are fairly well hidden.”

The context the book was set in was extraordinary and it was a huge risk to work on such material. “I had a long contract to say that Mitchell Beazley would pay all of my court costs if I was prosecuted for doing the drawings,” recalls Foss. “The shoot was during the Miners’ Strike when electricity was rationed. We would be in the studio with Charlie (Raymond) mid-flow and the power would just cut-out. We could have all been arrested.”

The fluid and anatomically correct pencil drawings that Foss created had an irresistible voyeuristic appeal. These were preceded by a series of delicate colour paintings by Raymond, offering an impact in the introduction and a taste of what was to come. The task for the design team of the new book was to spruce up this Seventies aesthetic while still tackling the subject matter head on. Illustration styles have come and gone since the Seventies and computers, seen by Foss as a hindrance – “those touch-screen computers are like doing something intimate with gloves on rather than with bare hands” – are now an important tool for many modern-day illustrators.

“It was a hard book to design, choosing the right kind of illustration that complemented the updated text. It had to be modern with no antiquated element, yet we wanted to hold onto the sexy elements of the first book and the charm of the bearded man,” says senior art director Juliette Norsworthy.

Twenty-eight-year-old illustrator Russell Faulkner, a graduate in Graphic Design Media at the London College of Communication, was commissioned for the project. “I had to find the middle ground between a Haynes manual and illustrated storytelling,” he smiles, “and try not to think about the first edition too much otherwise I would be too intimidated by the amazing illustrations.” Working from photographs of the two models who appear throughout the book, Faulkner created simplistic pencil drawings that outline the couple. These were then scanned into Photoshop, where he colourised them, combining digital and traditional methods. “I created forty-eight illustrations, taking about a day and a half on each one. It was a very difficult task as it is such a sensitive subject,” he admits. “The drawings were done at A3 and then they scaled them down which gives the details in the drawings a nicer quality.”

The cookbook template utilised in the early editions has remained, with themed sections such as appetisers, main courses, and sauces and pickles dividing up the subject matter. The chapters build slowly, moving logically from simple to more complicated manoeuvres as the book progresses. The centre of the book is the most erotic section and as such is purely illustrative. This is complemented at either end by photographs which set the scene and keep it in tune with reality. The new text has been written in Comfort’s style, allowing any alterations to fit in seamlessly with the original copy. “I have made a lot of changes,” says Quilliam. “There is more to say now and I had to bring in new research and up-to-date attitudes, but I left in all the things that Alex Comfort championed.”

This latest edition is a contemporary and engaging read but the design of the original book has such an endearing quality that while the content may be tame in today’s world, the sexual adventures of Bearded Man cannot be surpassed.