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About this bookAbout this EditionThis edition is a 1920 edition of Richard Burton's classic work, published by John Taylors, London. The advantage is that it is free, has no copyright as the publishing company has long since disappeared, and in html which can be viewed from any platform. This disadvantages are that there are no illustrations, it lacks several tables, is a younger edition and the Sanskrit spellings are not correct. Those desirous of the original 1885 edition by Kama Shastra Society should thence purchase OmniMedia's ebook. Now onwed by Exemplary Technologies, ( http://www.exemplary.net/publishing/anangaranga.html ), this more authoritative Ananga Ranga has a full search engine in hypertext. The OmniMedia version is thus far superior to this book, as it contains all tables, represents the original edition, correct Sanskrit spellings and all illustrations of the original. The present work does not contain all the tables, and the Sanskrit spellings have not been transliterated correctly, only a simple spelling has been used which necessarily reduces the present copy to a popular print. Scholars are thus advised to obtain the correct Ananga Ranga from OmniMedia website http://www.omnimedia.com/ and pay the fee required to read the full work. About This BookIn 1883, Sir Richard F. Burton and his friend Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot founded the Káma Shástra Society of London and Benares, devoted chiefly to the printing of Eastern works of an erotic nature. The ?Society? existed until Burton died in 1890.During this time, the society published five anonymous erotic works:
The Ananga-Ranga was previously published by Burton in 1873, well before the Káma Shástra Society was founded. However, this early edition is exceedingly rare-only four or six copies were printed under the quite different title Káma-Shástra, or The Hindoo Art of Love. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum (by H. S. Ashbee, London, 1877, p. 282) mentioned the reason for the scarcity of this early publication: ??the printer, on reading the proofs, became alarmed at the nature of the book, and refused to print off the edition.? The Káma Shástra Society was more successful in finding a publisher (Cosmopoli) willing to print it, and in 1885 the book, now renamed Ananga-Ranga, The Hindu Art of Love, was published in three reprints. Penzer stated in his excellent and informative bibliography of Burton?s works that ?cheap pirated editions are constantly arriving in England from Paris and Brussels,? showing the immense popularity of this work through the beginning of the 1900?s.? An excellent historical analysis of the Ananga-Ranga is given by Burton in the Preface so it will not be repeated here. Regarding the source material used for producing this electronic book, OmniMedia Digital Publishing purchased, at substantial cost because of its collector value, an original copy of the Third Reprint of the Ananga-Ranga, published by Cosmopoli (1885). This copy is clearly and unambiguously in the Public Domain. From this copy, OmniMedia Digital Publishing made every effort to faithfully reproduce the text, tables and figures as much as possible, including the use of accented characters and DevNagari fonts for the mantras. However, numerous spelling and other typographical errors were scattered throughout the text and were corrected. These typeset errors were possibly due to the haste in originally publishing this book out of fear the British authorities would stop publication prior to sale. In addition, significant effort was expended to bring reasonable consistency to the varied spelling of the large number of transliterated Sanskrit words, though 100% consistency would be a near Herculean task. Finally, the spellings of 19th century English words (such as ?colour? to ?color?) were changed to fit modern American English (with apologies to our friends in the U.K. and Canada.) Despite these many small corrections to the original text, the overall flavor and content of the text remains wholly faithful to the original-we believe Burton, who was quite pragmatic, would have approved of this corrected version. Regarding the figures, we did omit two small and fairly insignificant ones since they clearly served no useful purpose in illustrating the text, nor were there any references made to them. Carefully note that Chapters 9 and 10, will undoubtedly be the most popular of this work since they deal with the details and variety of foreplay and sexual intercourse (?love making?). They are similar in many respects to the analogous chapters in the well-known Káma Sútra of Vatsyayana and the Perfumed Garden of Sheik Nefzaoui (Burton also translated these works) We would like to thank Intellectual Property Solutions of Houston, Texas for providing the DevNagari font, and some much-needed advice, in order to faithfully reproduce the Sanskritic mantras found in Chapters 6 and 7 of this book. |
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