Richard Francis Burton's best-known book is perhaps…

Richard Francis Burton's best-known book is perhaps his translation of The Kama Sutra.

In fact, it is untrue that he was the translator, since the original manuscript was in ancient Sanskrit which he cannot read.

However, he had collaborated with Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot on the work and provides translations from other manuscripts of later translations.

The Kama Shastra Society had first printed the book in 1883 and numerous editions of the Burton translation are in print to this day.

His English translation from a French edition of the Arabic erotic guide The Perfumed Garden is printed in 1886 as The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui: A Manual of Arabian Erotology.

Burton is awarded a knighthood (KCMG) by Queen Victoria on February 5, 1886 .

He has written a number of travel books in this period that have not been particularly well received.

His best-known contributions to literature are those considered risqué or even pornographic at the time and which are published under the auspices of the Kama Shastra society.

These books include The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (1883) (popularly known as the Kama Sutra), The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1885) (more commonly known in English as The Arabian Nights because of Andrew Lang's abridged collection), The Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh Nefzawi (1886) and The Supplemental Nights to the Thousand Nights and a Night (sixteen volumes 1886–1898).

Burton had long had an interest in sexuality and some erotic literature.

However, the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 had resulted in many jail sentences for publishers, with prosecutions being brought by the Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Burton refers to the society and those who shared its views as Mrs. Grundy.

A way around this was the private circulation of books among the members of a society.

For this reason Burton, together with Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, had created the Kama Shastra Society to print and circulate books that would be illegal to publish in public.

Burton has mastered at least twenty-five languages—or forty, if distinct dialects are counted.

One of the most celebrated of all his books is his translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night in ten volumes, (1885) with six further volumes being added later.

The volumes are printed by the Kama Shastra Society in a subscribers-only edition of one thousand with a guarantee that there will never be a larger printing of the books in this form.

The stories collected are often sexual in content and are considered pornography at the time of publication.

In particular, the Terminal Essay in volume ten of the Nights contain a fourteen thousand word essay entitled "Pederasty" (Volume 10, section IV, D).

Burton postulates that male homosexuality is prevalent in an area of the southern latitudes named by him the "Sotadic zone".

Rumors about Burton's own sexuality are already circulating and are further incited by this work.