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Sex manual from 1920’s returned to library 55 years later

The New York Public Library finally got back an extremely overdue 1920s love-making manual — which was a total failure for the sex-starved borrower who checked it out 55 years ago.

“Funny thing is the book didn’t support his efforts with his first (and only) marriage . . . it failed!” said a note attached to the aging — and disturbingly dog-eared — copy of “Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique.”

“No wonder he hid the book!”

The sheepish note was penned by a anonymous Scottsdale, Ariz., man who said he found it among his late brother-in-law’s personal effects.

“So sorry!!” he wrote.

Mostly written in a style as dry as its name, the Jazz Age tome provides a plethora of old-time tips on making whoopie.

Some of the advice sounds more like it was written by R. Kelly than by a dutch gynecologist born in 1873, including one passage that compares romancing a woman to playing “a harp who only yields her secrets of melody to the master who knows how to handle her.”

“However dry and scientific, it is certainly more juicy than ‘Tropic of Cancer,’ ” cracked the Public Library’s managing librarian Billy Parrott, comparing the overdue book to the infamously sexy 1934 novel by Henry Miller.

Borrowed in 1959, “Ideal Marriage” was sent back to the library’s Fifth Avenue branch last year.

Parrott wrote in a recent blog post on the library’s Web site that the borrower probably failed to give the overdue book back because of the subject matter.

“In addition to the guilt associated with overdue fines, the patron also had to bear the humiliation of returning such a lurid book!” he wrote.

The librarian also said he perused the manual for notes written by readers in the margins over the years and found just one sentence underlined.

It describes men who “only care to relieve their own tensions and care nothing for their wives as an individual or mate.”

At least the borrower won’t be charged a late fee on the book, Parrott said. And since the book is outdated, it won’t go back into circulation.

Ordinarily, book hoarders pay a maximum fine of $12, at which point the work is considered lost and borrowers have to pony up the price of the book.