Rude Britannia: Museum’s Erotica
The British Museum and British Library have some of the biggest collections of smut in the world. This journalist got an exclusive peek inside a piece of antique furniture that, for many decades, has been privately known to the department’s staff as “the Porn Cupboard.” Money quote: “The British Museum has a strict duty to preserve objects — even pornographic ones — for posterity. A historic object isn’t any less historic because it causes offence, and the guardians of our cultural heritage can’t suddenly start behaving like the Taliban.”
