In this respect, the Puritans were dead right.”On deodorant: “A mouthful of aluminium chloride in a girl’s armpit is one of the biggest disappointments bed can afford.”On feathers: “Try stiff wiry ones or an old-fashioned feather mop.”On al fresco sex: “In England, to have regular love out-of-doors, you need to be frost-proof and own a park. One can’t shed two millennia of preachments with one’s underclothes.”On dancing: “All ballroom dancing in pairs looks towards intercourse. Good, unworried lovers use all five fingers of all four hands.”On orgies: “Orgies need a hell of a lot of martini lubrication. The occasional spank at the right moment fits well into most people’s repertoire.”On normality: “We don’t have a single, ‘normal’ pattern of sex behaviour, but a bunch of responses, like the fingers of a hand. Collecting them is obviously a human classificatory hobby.”On discipline: “There is a venerable superstition that beating is a sort of sexual tabasco, the hottest erotic condiment, and no way-out party or porn is complete without it. The wit and wisdom of Dr Alex Comfort On sexual postures: “Endless time has been spent throughout history, chiefly by non-playing coaches, in giving fancy names to upwards of 600 of these.

Even if you knew you were never really going to find yourself at a Californian orgy with 10 people imploring you to join them in an invigorating group flanquette. And you inwardly decided to book a place in this Edenic banqueting hall as soon as possible. You gazed at the strenuous rutting of the hairy man and his bossy wife, and laughed about it and inwardly digested its subtext: be ashamed of nothing, try absolutely everything unless it hurts, indulge your partner’s most bizarre whims, use your imagination, be amazed at what bodies can do when let off the societal leash. The amazing shock value of those early pictures may have evaporated over the years, but the insouciant text and genial libertarianism of his approach put a spring in the step of the post-Woodstock generation, and told it to treat sex more lightly, more recreationally in the future. He is also trustee of his dad’s estate and keeper of the flame of his reputation.Dr Alex Comfort, MB, DSc, has been dead for two years and most of his books are forgotten, but The Joy of Sex rides gleefully onwards. Comfort’s son Nicholas went on to become political adviser to the Secretary of State for Scotland, Helen Liddell.

The book’s publicist at Mitchell Beazley, Carmen Callil, went on to found the feminist house of Virago. The book’s art director, Peter Kindersley, became the co-founder of the high-design publishing company, Dorling Kindersley. His famous beard was shaved off years ago, but pale shadows of its shaggy magnificence grace his chin from time to time. The bearded man was dropped for the sequel, and, for later versions of The Joy of Sex, the soft 2B pencil drawings of John Raynes were employed instead – they showed a curly-haired Greek god pleasuring a lively twentysomething woman who much resembles (unless I’m imagining it) Julia Sawalha.Thirty years later, Charles Raymond now lives in the Wye Valley near the Welsh border, a passionate ecologist and keen musician. Sadly, you can’t see them any more, unless you know the American art collectors who snapped up the originals in 1972. Come on, Charles!” Then she would tick off the number on a piece of paper and say, “Right Charles, now we do this one…”Mr and Mrs Raymond are, therefore, the couple – the hairy caveman and the stroppy Fr?ein – that you could see in the original book, drawn faithfully by Raymond’s own hand and that of Chris Foss.