Some Personal Reflections on The Origin and Value of the Archives of Sexuality and Gender Part III

In Part Three of the “Archives of Sexuality & Gender” (ASG), Gale-Cengage have published a collection of more than one million pages of text from restricted library collections in Britain and North America. Under the title “Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century,” the archive includes the contents of the British Library’s Private Case, plus nearly sixteen hundred books from the New York Academy of Medicine, plus nearly one thousand books from the Kinsey Institute. Private Case collections such as these are special, restricted, and often secret collections of printed books that are kept separate from the main collection within a library because of their focus on sex and sexuality. These collections have a long history and have gone under a variety of amusing, obtuse and exotic names, such as the Bibliothèque nationale’s “enfer” (i.e., inferno or Hell), Oxford University’s  (phi—sounds like “Fie!”) and Cambridge University’s “Arc.” (arcana; i.e., secret or mystery).1