There were three formative influences when I started out on the research that will eventually lead to a Guide to Erotic Art in London’s National Gallery once a publisher has been found. There was Ian Tovey, the illustrator with whom I go back to 1995 and the World’s first newspaper to be worn on the head. There was the Decima Four - four young art graduates whose lair was an small art gallery which they had set up in Decima Street, Bermondsey. They did the initial trawl for erotic art in the National Gallery on my behalf, tramping through room after room with clipboards ticking boxes on pre-printed forms. And there was the Atrium Bookshop in Cork Street Mayfair, alas no more.

Tovey and the Decima Four are prime subjects for special articles on this web site but I am dealing with the Atrium Bookshop now because it jumped into my mind when I was thinking about what to write about the curtained picture in the Horrible Hogarth’s second of six Marriage a La Mode paintings. This mysterious picture will be the subject of a detour from the main body of discussion of this famous work under the title Drawing back the Curtain on Mr Hogarth. One of the books that I found at Atrium introduced me to Courbet’s The Origin of the World which is a seminal work in the history of erotic art and which spent a large part of its early life hidden from view behind a curtain. Hence the connection.

The Atrium Bookshop was probably the best specialist art book shop there ever was. It was run by a group of Sloan Rangerish young women which always made me feel slightly uncomfortable given the kind of literature that I was looking for. I quickly discovered that Atrium kept the more scholarly of their pornographic books (or may be I should say the more pornographic of their scholarly books) on a shelf 2 inches above floor level. The Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris has its famous L’Enfer (literally “from Hell”) collection and the British Museum its “Private Case”, access to both of which is as closely guarded as if they were the repositories for state secrets. Atrium did almost as well, as far as I was concerned, by positioning the books in a place where it was necessary to endure considerable pain in order to get at them if one happened to be of a certain age and stiff of joint. But get down I did and there I discovered a trove of books on erotic themes which taken together effectively defined, as it turned out, the project.

Among the books that I purchased from Atrium on a single day’s foray were: Ganymede in the Renaissance - Homosexuality in Art and Society (James Saslow), Heaven & the Flesh - Imagery of desire from the Renaissance to the Rococo (Clive Hart and Kay Stevenson), Taking Positions - On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Bette Talvacchia), The Invention of Pornography - Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity 1500 - 1800 (Lynn Hunt, Editor), Solitary Pleasures - The Historical, Literary and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism (Paula Bennett and Vernon Rosario, Editors) and The Rear View - A brief and elegant history of bottoms through the ages (Jean-Luc Hennig).

Solitary Pleasures was notable for providing as fine an example as could be imagined of literary badge engineering - the equivalent of Bride stripped bare by her Bachelors Even as a name for a work of art. The literary “come-on” took the form of a contribution by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick re-running an earlier piece by her entitled Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl. Fans of Jane Austen were, of course, outraged on the article’s first appearance but Ms Sedgwick’s career prospered. (I was later to discover that she is a highly respected feminist sex maven - her field of expertise being sometimes referred to as “queer theory”).

Taking Positions is all about I modi, the sixteen drawings produced by Giulio Romano in the 1520’s illustrating sixteen positions of sex. In that moment pornography was born and although the Church promptly moved to suppress them, hunting down those involved, the genii was out of the bottle. The author deserves credit for her identification of a phenomenon in erotic art largely unnoticed by other writers: the slung leg. It is a device developed by artists during the Renaissance to signify copulation without depicting the act itself.

In 1997 The Origin of the World was one of the main attractions in the Women in the 19th Century exhibition put on by the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, where the painting has found a permanent home. The book of the show took the form of a folder containing each of the twenty four paintings on cards with an introduction penned by the well known feminist art historian Linda Nochlin. Nochlin and I met on the Shelf L’Enfer, one might say. Ms Nochlin relates the Courbet picture to the then recent invention of photography which had immediately lead to the creation of pornography for the consumption of a new male market for visual erotica. One result of the impact of the visual realism of photography, says La Nochlin, is that when the ageing Ingres was putting the final touches to his La Source (1856) he added an inviting droop of the belly and a come-hither glance not seen in his earlier nudes.

Jean-Luc Hennig’s masterly exposition on bottoms is by turns chatty and erudite. Its failing grace is that it lacks illustrations. Which is like picnicking in a parking bay on the side of a motorway. Jean-Luc Hennig tells a good story about Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa which, without an illustration, is less than user friendly. He quotes a Quebec art critic Suzanne Giroux as saying that the painting, if turned on its side, conceals a boy’s behind. The artist’s homosexuality, hidden during his life time as best he could, provides a plausible explanation, she says, as to why he should take the trouble of painting the remainder of the picture just to put on to canvas this tiny vignette of desire. The book does have one illustration. The dust cover shows an appropriate view of Canova’s Three Graces - the Pepysian Moment of sculpted bottoms.

Atrium, sadly, proved too good to be true. Even though they were never shy of pricing-up a difficult-to-find book (Heaven & the Flesh, 235 pages, I recollect, cost me £35) and although they clearly did an extensive mail order business, it was a mystery to me that they could afford to pay a Cork Street rent. All around them in Cork Street were galleries with large expanses of light coloured walls punctuated by an occasional Lichtenstein, Pollock, Rouchenberg or Warhol and patrolled by sloopy looking receptionists. True that Atrium’s complement of sloopy girls was the equal of any, but there is a difference in terms of economies of scale between selling books, even at £35, and a nice Roy Lichtenstein with an impeccable provenance at $2,000,000. Eventually Atrium were taken over by Christies, the fine art auctioneers, and soon after that they were shut down.

Of the books liberated from Atrium’s Shelf L’ Enfer, Solitary Pleasures was perhaps the greatest eye-opener. It deals with masturbation which is still a taboo subject in most sections of society and is an anthology of papers submitted by university academics to a symposium held in 1989 under the title The Muse of Masturbation. If the dictionary meaning of “prurience” is correct - “characterised by or appealing to an inordinate interest in sex” - it is not possible to write about masturbation in a wholly clinical way such as one might find in a textbook about gynaecology or urology. Nevertheless the six men and four women brought to their task a certain aplomb and can not be accused of failing to explore the subject in all its ramifications

Amazon.com. completely filled the yawning gap left by the demise of Atrium. Indeed, even if Atrium had struggled on after the takeover, Amazon would surely have dispatched it to an honoured place between the Great Bookends in the Sky. If I had to chose the most significant titles in my bookcase which were born of a click on an amazon.com or .uk web page they would be: Leo Steinberg’s The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, Marylin Yalom’s A History of the Breast and The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. The Indispensible Hall’s Dictionary and Kenneth Clark’s The Nude I had previously acquired from Atrium, although not from the Shelf L’Enfer. The Story of Art by the All Knowing Gombrich, The Arts by Guru Hendrick Willem van Loon and the Dictionary of Art and Artists by the always dependable Murrays I bought in second hand book shops. This still leaves several hundred books that came from somewhere and I am getting one or other down from the bookshelf all the time. Anyone writing about erotic art cannot live by the Internet alone.

During my short acquaintance with Atrium a very strange thing happened. The shop’s clientele included photographers and from time to time a small area at the back was put aside for a display of their work. Whether as a publicity stunt or for whatever reason the girls behind the counter allowed one of the photographers to photograph them in the nude. The event made a newspaper diary piece and reading it made me want to see it for myself. Very strange feeling walking past the girls on the way to look at the photographs of them without clothes. Particularly as I was not sure where the back room was and had to ask for directions.