Delta of Venus. Erotica by Anaïs Nin

Condition: used (time ware)
Harvest Book, Harcourt Inc., 1977

"April 1940
A book collector offered Henry Miller a hundred dollar a month to write erotic stories. It seems like a Dantesque punishment to condemn Henry to  write erotica at a dollar a page. He rebelled because his mood of the moment was the opposite of Rabelaisian, because writing with to order was a castrating occupation, because to be writing with a voyeur at the keyhole took all the spontaneity and pleasure out of his fanciful adventures. 

[...]

When Henry needed money for his travel expenses he suggested that I do some writing in the interim. I felt I did not want to give anything genuine, and decided to create a mixture of stories I had heard and inventions, pretending they were from the diary of a woman. I never met the collector. he was to read my pages and to let me know what he thought. Today I received a telephone call. A voice said, 'It was fine. But leave out the poetry and descriptions of anything but sex. Concentrate on sex.'"

– from the Preface (which was adapted from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume III)