EROTICA -- Thomas Leycester POULTON (1890 - 1963). An Artist's Secret Sketchbook.[London: The Double Crown Club / The Erotic Print Society, c.1940]. Folio (490x 310 mm). 120 photo-reproduced drawings, many with additions in pencil, some with original photographs of the participants affixed, large original signed drawing to inside of rear cover. Pictorial wooden boards with metal edges and visible stitching, housed in custom lettered folding clamshell case. Condition: dampstaining, stamps to verso of each sheet; wear to boards. Provenance: likely Thomas Poulton; Fernando Durán Subastas de Arte, Madrid, 18 December 2000, lot 191. poulton's rare 'secret 'sketchbook' with photographic and pencil additions; most likely poulton's copy. Thomas Poulton was a Soho artist who counted among his friends Virginia Woolf, Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon and D.H. Lawrence. His fascination with erotic drawings began while stationed at Khajuraho in India which housed the Kama Sutra. While a professional illustrator for surgery manuals and a cartographer for the Ministry of Defense, Poulton kept his erotic works private for fear of seizure by the police as was the norm of the time. Poulton's wife was his model and they worked from the privacy of their country home in the Sussex countryside, often working secretly on commission. He eventually took a flat above a call-girl in Soho and joined the literary set of the time. Most of Poulton's erotic drawings were destroyed by his family upon his death and extant copies of the folio are very rare. This is believed to be Poulton's own copy, extra-illustrated with numerous personal photographs and photographs given to him for commissions, and a large color drawing on the inside of back cover.