One of the good things about being a nobody is that when you die and they find your porn stash, it doesn't make the news:

A stash of explicit pornography belonging to Franz Kafka has emerged after being ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the writer’s image, new research suggests.

Having stumbled by chance across the material in copies of his journals in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford, James Hawes, an academic and Kafka expert, reveals some of this erotic material in Excavating Kafka, published this month.

The pornography’s publisher, Franz Blei, was also the man who first published Kafka in 1908 – a series of miniature stories later gathered in his book Meditation.

Dr Hawes, an admirer of Kafka, whose classics include The Metamorphosis, says that the discovery of the author’s stash shows him as more human than his popular quasi-saintly image. But even today the pornography would be on the top shelf.“These are not naughty postcards from the beach,” Dr Hawes said. “They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark. It’s quite unpleasant."

Well, duh. You wouldn't expect someone like Franz Kafka to have a collection of bright, cheerful pornography, would you?

Posted by: Sean M. at 07:49 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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