MANNERS & MORALS: How to Stop Gin Rummy

It weighed nearly three pounds, its 804 pages were a dreary morass of technical jargon and statistical charts, it cost $6.50. But last week the U.S. was taking to Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, commonly known as "the Kinsey report" (TIME, Jan. 5), the way it had once taken to the Charleston, the yo-yo and the forcing two-bid.

Not since Gone With the Wind had booksellers seen anything like it. Out less than two months, it had already sold 200,000 copies. Its publisher, Philadelphia's W. B. Saunders Co., a staid old medical-and-textbook house, kept two presses running steadily to...