Inside these covers you will find a collection of licentious limericks which have been handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth, some of them for over a hundred years. Until quite recently, few of these verses had ever appeared in print for public consumption, although many had been privately printed and circulated from time to time.

This definitive collection of the world’s rudest, lewdest limericks will perhaps finally bestow respectability upon stanzas long venerated in oral tradition. Most of them are bawdy, some are wickedly clever — all are guaranteed to raise a laugh.

There was a young man from Kildare,
Who was having his girl on the stair;
On the forty-fourth stroke,
The banister broke
And he finished her off in mid-air.