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Tony Perrottet: Guidebooks to Babylon

Tony Perrottet is the author of “The Sinner’s Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe.”

Librarians may regard me as a highbrow pervert, frowning over their spectacles at my choice of reading matter. In certain archives, I’ve even been directed to sit at a solitary table, where my movements can be carefully watched. But I’ve learned to ignore the suspicious looks. The truth is, for any writer who is researching a “golden age” of vice — whether it be Renaissance Venice, Georgian London, belle époque Paris or fin de siècle New Orleans — there is nothing quite so satisfying as a guide to local harlots.

...[T]oday, the rare survivals of these flimsy publications are revered — at least by social historians. There is no more vivid means of evoking the shadowy back streets, raucous taverns and perfumed boudoirs of a vanished city than to pore over a prostitute directory’s brittle, yellowed pages. “Historians love it when they stumble across these guides,” said Debby Applegate, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who is working on a biography of Polly Adler, Manhattan’s most famous madam from the 1920s to the ’40s. “They’re like underground directories to a city. They tell you a huge amount, including how prostitution was so much more widespread than people realize, seeping far beyond the red-light districts.”

The first guidebooks appeared in Renaissance Venice, when the city’s aristocratic courtesans were becoming renowned throughout Europe for their accomplishment, wit and sparkling conversation. Dating from 1565, “The Catalogue of All the Principal and Most Honored Courtesans of Venice” is a list of 210 working girls, with names, addresses and fees in gold scudos. The genre took a leap forward in the carnal free-for-all of 18th-century London with “Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies,” a best-­selling annual published each Christmas season from 1757 to 1795 under the name of the era’s most notorious pimp, Jack Harris. Each edition offered Zagat-style reviews of London belles, including their figures, tastes, complexions and personal hygiene (and a pre-modern-dentistry obsession with the condition of their teeth)....

Read entire article at NYT