Some things you may not know about Alfred Kinsey/Some things you might want to read online

• He was an entomologist by training, a foremost authority on gall wasps.

• His Edible Wild Plants of North America, published in the early 1940s, was voted the most important book of the year by the trustees of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

• Sexual Behavior in the Human Male encountered a storm of condemnation and acclaim when it was first published in 1948. The book cost $6.50, had 804 pages and weighed three pounds. According to David Halberstam, writing in a 1993 issue of American Heritage, Kinsey received no advance against royalties from the publisher and whatever money was made was turned back to his own “think tank,” then called the Institute for Sex Research.

• The Kinsey Data: Marginal Tabulations of the 1938-1963 Interviews Conducted by the Institute for Sex Research was originally published in 1979. It was the culmination of the Kinsey Institute’s desire to compile and publish the data from the original case histories of men and women taken from 1938 to 1963.

• The IU Press re-published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, and The Kinsey Data in May 1998 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Kinsey Institute.

• Indiana Alumni magazine chose IU author and Distinguished Professor Scott Sanders to conduct an interview with Kinsey’s 21st century successor, John Bancroft, director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. Read the interview from the January-February 2002 issue online:

http://www.indiana.edu/~alumni/magtalk/jan-feb02/fortress.html

• A lecture by Bancroft, “If I Could Choose, What Kind of Sexual World Would This Be?” was presented during AIDS Awareness Week last month on the IU Bloomington campus. Read the text online at this Web site:

http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/about/if-I-could-choose.html