Erotic stories by Anaïs Nin consigned to Amazon's adult content 'dungeon'

A new volume of lost writing by the author Anaïs Nin has been consigned by online retailer Amazon to its “adult content dungeon” – which is not as kinky as it sounds.

Instead it means that Amazon has effectively made the new book, Auletris: Erotica, invisible on its platform to anyone who searches for it under an “All Departments” filter.

The publisher of the book, American independent outfit Sky Blue Press, calls Amazon’s decision “unbelievable”.

Editor Paul Herron, whose detective work is to thank for the discovery of the manuscript, says that Auletris: Erotica exceeds in its “boldness and variety” Nin’s well-known – and still easily available – erotic works Delta of Venus and Little Birds.

“Auletris breaks many taboos. There are tales of incest, sex with children, rape, voyeurism, cutting, sadomasochism, homoeroticism (both male and female) [and] autoerotic asphyxiation, to name a few,” he wrote on the Anaïs Nin blog. “The characters are deliciously decadent, and the themes are largely based on Nin’s own experiences, recorded in her unexpurgated diaries. This book comes along just as interest in both Nin and the genre of erotica is booming,”

Herron told the Guardian: “Amazon has essentially blocked viewers from knowing Auletris exists by placing it in what is known as the ‘adult content dungeon’, which means that it does not show up when one searches for the title, unless the search is refined – and very few potential readers know this.”

If readers go, therefore, to any of the company’s platforms and search “Auletris” under All Departments, the book does not show up. If they change the search filter to Kindle Store or Books, then a message appears saying that the results are adult content and they have to click through to see the product.

“That extra step is the difference between buying or not buying,” Herron says. “Everyone I know in the erotica business tells me that, when Amazon places a book in the dungeon, it kills sales.”

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Herron says he has been met with “stiff, mindless opposition” in his appeals to Amazon to have the book removed from the dungeon, and has been told by five different people at the company that “rules are rules” and that “what gets a book rated adult is what you would expect”.

Amazon said that for them to bring the book back into the normal storefront, the cover would have to be modified to remove any bare nipples. The cover image is currently based on an erotic French postcard found in Nin’s possessions. In addition, the content of the book would have to be toned down.

“This is impossible,” Herron says, “because it is, after all, erotica. When I pressed on, using every bit of logic I could muster – for instance [that] Fifty Shades of Grey is searchable, as are Nin’s Delta of Venus and Little Birds – not only was I given the brush-off, I was told that they were considering rating the other Nin erotica as ‘adult’, thereby rendering them as invisible as Auletris. This has yet to happen, but there was at least that threat. Note there is no such threat for Fifty Shades of Grey, which has made them a whole lot of cash.”

The stories that form Auletris were discovered by Herron in the papers of Gunther Stuhlmann, who was Nin’s literary agent and who died in 2002. Correspondence mentioned them and the papers included photocopied pages from the proposed book.

It appears the stories had been written specifically for an unnamed patron in the 1930s, at a pay rate of one dollar per page, and were later published with a print run of just five copies in 1950 by Press of the Sunken Eye, prompting Herron to try to track down a surviving copy. He did, and it was republished by Sky Blue Press on 20 October this year.

Herron says: “The reason I believe Auletris is an important addition to Nin’s canon is that it is pure Nin – not to mention the fact that most of the book has never seen the light of day. I did not tinker with the contents – did not refine, cut, rearrange, change the phrasing, etc – but only tended to grammatical and spelling matters. I want the reader to experience exactly what the mysterious collector, for whom Nin wrote at a dollar a page, did.”

Nin, who died in 1977 aged 73, was no stranger to brushes with prudishness. The publication in 1961 of her lover Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Cancer led directly to obscenity trials in the States.

At the time of publication, Amazon had not responded to a request for comment.