PAGES : No Monopoly for Madonna

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich would like to remind the world that Madonna does not hold the patent on sexual confessions. In “Incest,” HBJ’s latest installment of Anais Nin’s diaries, Nin reveals that she was simultaneously sleeping with her psychoanalyst, her cousin Edwardo, her husband and her father. The new volume also describes her relationship with Henry Miller and his wife, June--although this old news was chronicled earlier in Nin’s best-selling “Henry & June.”

In 1932, 60 years before Madonna and friends posed for “Sex,” Nin was detailing her intimate moments. Even at the time of her death in Los Angeles in 1977, Nin was at work on her journals.

Meanwhile, Madonna’s literary shadow also hovers over a dispute between Boston’s Beacon Press and R.R. Donnelly & Sons, the company that printed “Sex.” Beacon says Donnelly cited “very sexually explicit material” in refusing to print “Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies,” in which philosopher Richard Mohr analyzes gay erotic images.

“It is ridiculous that Donnelly would find Madonna’s work more acceptable than Mohr’s essays,” says Beacon Press Director Wendy Strothman. “Gay Ideas,” published this month, was eventually printed by Rapaport Metropolitan commercial printers of New York.