Eugenic utopian fantasy of a doctor’s dream-journey to the liberated land of Amor. Presents an impassioned argument for free universal health care, contraception, no-fault divorce, social clubs, collective childcare facilities, and — most prominently — comprehensive applied sex education: A healthy, educated sex life is vividly imagined by the author to be a cure for any number of societal ills, both real and imagined: venereal disease; mental institutions; child abandonment; impotence; marital violence, gender inequality, infidelity, and all the various ‘perversions’ allegedly born of ignorance. As a finishing touch, in Amor, “a complete physical and mental examination is required before permission to have a child is granted,” because in Amor, childbearing is the business of the commonwealth, not the individual. No theoretical objections to this are raised or considered by the text.

Pritcher’s thesis provides an occasion for numerous anecdotal digressions, in which the narrator describes the sad and unhealthy sexual practices of Adamites — the peoples of Earth — to the Amorites, his hosts, who do not ask him for the explicit details but have to listen to them anyway. Presumably for this reason, the book was once held in the Delta Collection of the Library of Congress with other materials classed as pornographic, obscene or otherwise restricted.

Pritcher’s preface praises Havelock Ellis, Bertrand Russell, Judge [Benjamin] Lindsay, and Margaret Sanger for advocating enlightenment and defying bigotry. Nevertheless, the text combines both progressive and extremely regressive ideals to paint a picture of a 1930s America filled with “despotic, scheming, plotting female tyrants, all of the ice box variety” and an urban landscape where two young women may find “perfect sex satisfaction and happiness” with one another, because “in the large centers, such sex perverts find enough of their kind to live in a world apart from normal human beings. They have their own clubs, hotels and places of amusement.” These are presented as problems to be fixed.

Cited in Sargent’s bibliography of Utopian Literature in English as A LOVE STARVED WORLD; six library holdings were located in OCLC, all of which appear to be catalogued under both the alternate title and the one above (which is to say, the holdings are identical across the two listings). All copies also list identical publication info, leading us to believe these books are one and the same. But scarce under any name.

$500