Guidebooks to Babylon

Old guidebooks of vice are warmly discussed on the New York Times.

From the piece...

To the uninitiated, these clandestine directories make the most dubious of all literary subgenres. They were created, of course, to provide practical information for gentlemen travelers venturing through a city’s demimonde, and so have titles that range from mildly risqué (“The Pretty Women of Paris,” “Directory to the Seraglios”) to unashamedly coarse (“A Catalogue of Jilts, Cracks and Prostitutes, Nightwalkers, Whores, She-Friends, Kind Women and Others of the Linnen-Lifting Tribe”). The prose is rarely distinguished. Many of the guidebooks doubled as cheap erotica, filled with unsavory jokes and double-entendres. And even the most successful were designed to be disposable. Written anonymously (or with pseudonyms worthy of Bart Simpson, like A. Butt Ender or Free Loveyer), they were printed on poor-quality paper in pocket-size editions, distributed under the table and generally discarded soon after use.

But today, 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.”