It was virtually inevitable that the prolific London-based Erotic Print Society would at some point publish its own version of the Kama Sutra, and when The Essential Kama Sutra appeared in 2003 it quickly sold out, to be reprinted in 2004 and 2006; copies still attract high second-hand prices.

In all honesty the EPS version is rather a mishmash of text, photographs and artwork, but to its credit it was courageous enough to publish photographs – and include the Lynn Paula Russell drawings shown here – depicting believably real people engaged in believably real sex. It helped that The Essential Kama Sutra was a subscriber-only volume which did not have to consider the constraints of bookshop exposure.

Most of the artists featured in the book, including Sylvie Jones, Monica Guevara, Vania Zouravliev and Tom Sargeant, had regularly illustrated for the Erotic Print Society, but Lynn Paula Russell’s hugely popular and atmospheric drawings constitute nearly half the graphic works.

As far as the photographs in the book are concerned, the book’s Foreword explains that ‘As publishers, the Society had a decision to make: many versions of the Kama Sutra have been illustrated by photography, but these are almost always rather coy, soft-focus affairs with couples assuming the various positions without actually having sex. It seemed to us that they weren’t particularly helpful in understanding the way in which the various positions actually worked. In the end we felt that we could not compromise here as so many had before; in this day and age it seemed absurd to pull our punches, so we found an attractive young couple to model for us and hired the services of a well-known photographer. The results were far beyond our expectations. The images are joyful, instructive and arousing – not unlike the text of the Kama Sutra itself.’