Until this week only doctors and lawyers could legitimately buy Dr. Henry Havelock Ellis' compendious topographical survey of the vast, tangled jungles of sex activities which flourish in human bodies, souls and minds. When in 1897 this inquisitive Englishman published Sexual Inversion, from which was to grow his mighty Studies in the Psychology of Sex, London police promptly arrested the bookseller and confiscated all available copies of this volume. Year later Frank A. Davis of Philadelphia, as a personal favor to Dr. Ellis, began printing his Studies, which eventually ran to seven volumes and retailed for $30 per set. Mr. Davis was very strict about selling only to the professions. Since the War, however, there has been such a great change in the U. S. attitude toward sex that Bennett A. Cerf, head of Manhattan's Random House, felt safe in bringing out this week a new four-volume edition of Studies in the Psychology of Sex and selling them to all-comers at $15 per set. This unexpurgated edition, printed from the old Davis plates, had behind it a mass of U. S. court decisions which, to Mr. Cerf, seemed to remove the last effective restrictions on the popular publication of the Ellis masterwork (TIME, Dec. 18, 1933).
No one would tell Havelock Ellis intelligible facts about life when he was a lad. Only son of good & religious seafaring English parents, when he was 16, "like many other boys of my age ... I was much puzzled over the phenomena of sex. ... I determined that I would make it the main business of my life to get to the real natural facts of sex apart from all would-be moralistic or sentimental notions, and so spare the youth of future generations the trouble and the perplexity which this ignorance had caused me."
Soon as he could he entered a London medical school, studying there for eight years, until in 1889 he was given a diploma as a physician, surgeon and midwife. While in medical school he initiated and edited the Mermaid Series of Elizabethan dramatists and a series of books called Contemporary Science. Later he wrote poetry and literary essays. His world reputation today, however, rests almost entirely upon his calm encyclopedic surveys of the love-life of men & women, of its aberrations, and of its relation to society.
In the beginning Dr. Ellis poked around London and Paris asking impertinent questions of men & women. Soon he discovered that most people like to talk about their sex life. Therefore he holed himself up with a great collection of books on the manners and customs of primitive and ancient peoples and let the concupiscent, the celibate and the sexually miserable beat a path to his study and tell him all. His marriage in 1891 to bubbling Edith M. O. Lees, who died in 1916, made his sage-in-the-study life practicable. Their only marriage vow was not to deceive one another. They confidently maintained separate homes, and she did not disturb him in his investigations.