I suspect that "a geography of the condom" will strike many people as a strange subject, even though they would accept quite readily that the condom has an interesting history, from the fishskins employed by Regency bucks and other men about town across eighteenth-century Europe, to pictures of the British prime minister and the queen (separately, not together) on condom packets in Victorian times. After all, said these most proper portraits, even "nice people" may use condoms. . . .

Peter Gould, The Slow Plague, Blackwell, 1993, 47.