The Joy of Sex Dr Alex Comfort Mitchell Beazley, 240pp, £17.99 ISBN 1840005564

Last September, strictly in the course of research, I ordered a large number of sex books from Amazon. My shoulders sagged in despair as boxload after boxload arrived at my front door. I figured if anyone hacked into my Amazon account, they'd think I was a sex addict, or desperate.

Friends, the occasional dinner date and passing workmen would pick up books from my desk discreetly entitled A Hand in the Bush: the fine art of vaginal fisting, How to Satisfy a Woman Every Time . . . and Have Her Beg for More, Hot Monogamy and Extended Massive Orgasm. The property developer from upstairs, or JR the plumber, would say: "Are you really reading this? Wouldn't mind borrowing it when you've finished." (Nobody picked up Hot Monogamy.) Two women, who weren't Vanessa Feltz, obsessed over Satisfying the Black Man Sexually.

Some of the sex books I'd ordered, like some sex lives that were being described to me during research, were breathtakingly awful. When I wasn't thinking: "How does this trash get published?" I was thinking: "Why do people put up with such trashy sex lives?"

But there are good sex books, and I had conversations about tender, loving sex: breathy accounts of that through-the-roof stuff where you writhe in ecstatic pleasure and it's wonderful, marvellous. Please, I had to say. Enough. I get the picture. And I'd go home and kick the cat.

In the good-to-excellent range of books, there was one that I should have read years ago but somehow didn't. The Joy of Sex by Dr Alex Comfort was first published in 1972. It was ground-breaking, controversial - the first "how to" sex manual. At the time, it shocked many, because sex was, after all, invented in 1963. The book has now sold eight million copies worldwide. My paperback copy from Amazon (Quartet Books, £6) has a glossy cover with a soft-focus headshot of a couple about to kiss. The title is in rather jaunty, plump black type. Dr Comfort's name is in red. It's a bright, fresh presentation.

It was a relief to read an intelligent, helpful book written by a professional - the sort of person my grandmother would have called A Lovely Man. Dr Comfort (who can resist the name?) comes across as charming, literate and witty - and a passionate believer that sex should be enjoyed. He should have been knighted for enlightening millions about sex in the Seventies.

Oh, for sure many of his ideas and expressions jarred. I didn't warm to "shaving is ignorant vandalism" and "deodorants should be banned absolutely".

Since then, attitudes to sex have changed enormously; there's masses more to say than Dr Comfort says. But the fundamental things apply and they were well expressed. Listen, for £6, I had a classic for my bookshelves - 256 pages with updated illustrations (no bearded men). What's to grumble about?

Fast forward to 2002. Mitchell Beazley has produced a 30th-anniversary edition that weighs, so help me, about a kilo and is printed on heavy matt-coated paper. In a burst of restraint, it has chosen maiden-aunt mauve, in various strengths, as the colour of the matt cover, the typeface and even the pages. Mauve type on mauve pages is not what you call easy on the eye. And who, at the early planning meeting, said: "Mauve. Doesn't that just scream SEX?" But it doesn't: this book resembles a funeral directors' handbook. Or something ecclesiastical.

The publicity blurb says that this seminal work has been "updated", "redesigned" and "refreshed", "fully revised and updated" and "the stylish new design" is accompanied with "a new range of beautiful colour photographs". I say get outta here - apart from 16 colour-page photographs of a blonde with nice breasts, good eyeliner and a man, the illustrations are identical to last year's. Merely twice the size. And the famous Joy of Sex text? It reads pretty much the same as before. The same information, more spaced out. Armpit-shaving is still banned.

Funny how at six quid you think "fine", but at £18 you're a damn sight more demanding. Suddenly I winced at Comfort's sexual menu idea and his references to sexual positions and manoeuvres in French - as though only the educated could grasp the meaning of interesting sex.

I may be moving in the wrong circles, but words such as "cassolette", "cuissade", "negresse", "postillionage" and "croup- ade" don't seem to feature. Rear entry, yes; croupade no.

In 2002, sex is in yer face, on the telly, in the tabloids, at the cinema, on the web, in a teenager's bedroom near you. Most of us have now tried it. And those of us who aren't too tired, or too married, may well try it again.

What we need is fresh information, inspiration, healthy new debate and a bit of whizzy enthusiasm. I recommend the hip and brilliantly informative, 694-page Guide to Getting It On! by Paul Joannides (Vermillion, £14.99). What we don't need is the overweight, overpriced, regurgitated, sadly dated, deadly dull-looking, 30th-anniversary (mauve) edition of The Joy of Sex.

Marcelle d'Argy Smith has just written The Lovers' Guide: what women really want (Carlton Books, £14.99)

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