“Where’re the erect penises?” That’s what one publisher asks her as she meanders through the cavernous, plush-carpeted Jacob Javits Center at the New York Book Expo. Haidl, who grew up in Montgomery County and now lives in Ocean City, N.J., is here in New York at the very least to learn how to publish her coffee-table tome about threesomes, and, at the most, to snag a sweet deal from one of the publishing houses.

You would think that such a book, given the human fascination with threesomes, would be snatched up, so to speak. It's simple, and clever. It's surely more titillating than the insipid, touchy-feely Fathers and Sons, Sisters and Mothers and Daughters books that are so popular of late.

Her book, which she is shopping around in galley form, explores threesomes with artsy black-and-white pictures and more than a dozen essays written by women and men who have experienced a ménage à trois or two. But here's Haidl's quandary: Erotica and pornographic publishers have deemed it not explicit enough (one suggested photographs of models with bigger breasts), and mainstream American book houses find it a little too racy, and possibly offensive to their other, more conservative clients.

Haidl, who is 5 feet tall and in her 40s, conceived the idea for her book, III: Images of Fantasy and Experience, in the late '90s. She was reeling over a breakup, and she planned a night on the town as a distraction.

She hit a few bars, flirted with some younger men -- "It was harmless," she explains. "I tend not to be with younger men."

"It reminded me of college," she says, with a slight grin on her porcelain, freckle-dusted face. "It was a wonderful, full experience -- I think I really needed that."

The three of them would become semi-regular lovers, getting together a half-dozen times over the next four years. The experience, she says, profoundly affected her. She started asking around, talking to friends, and discovered that sex with two partners wasn't as uncommon as she had thought.

She envisioned creating a book with an emphasis on actual experience versus the obsessive frat-boy fantasy. She gathered up a handful of models, real people, some of them dancers from the Philadelphia area, and hired three area photographers to shoot them, Philip Isaiah Katz, Nicole DeGeorge and Stephen Coan. She solicited essays to accompany the pictures.

Although Haidl is used to fighting for what she has (she's currently waging a renters' rights battle, has organized volunteerism drives in Ocean City and once owned her own cleaning business), she didn't realize her dream book would be so difficult to sell.

"You push and push and fall down," she says, looking almost defeated. "And you realize how knowledgeable you really have to be."

After years of working on the book, throwing herself into it fully, taking self-publishing courses and enduring a harrowing legal battle with one of the photographers, Haidl is ready to see a finished product on bookstore shelves. She mailed out her proposal to dozens of American and European publishers, only to receive one rejection letter after another. Even men's magazines declined to give her the time of day.

She tried creating media buzz to raise the money needed to publish the book herself (under the name UnConventional Books), which would run her about $10,000, not including distribution costs. Most radio stations turned her down. She did manage to secure a guest spot on a Baltimore station. Her appearance generated 400 hits to her website, www.sexualtriads.com, but, disappointingly, only one order.

On the final day of the book fair on Sunday, Haidl is visibly weary. She's been trudging around the book expo, dog-eared galley in tow, for the past few days. And she's regretting her choice of footwear -- narrow, pointy heels.

She's had some luck with foreign publishers, who aren't as squeamish about publishing sex books, but she's been hoping to get noticed by an American publisher.

It's almost 2 in the afternoon. She stops by a booth set up by Philadelphia-based book house Running Press, whose best-selling titles include Sisters, Girlfriends and a panoply of For Dummies titles. She can't remember if she'd stopped by before; her mind's muddled from three days of teetering around on said heels, pitching to anyone who will give her a minute of his or her time.

It seems Running Press has recently expanded to include sexy titles, and a series of sex-advice VHS tapes are proudly displayed on the counter. After a few minutes of small talk laced with a bit of hard sell, Haidl gets a contact name, rather than a flat-out "no."

After the show ends tonight, she'll board a Greyhound back to Ocean City, where an eviction notice awaits her. (That's a whole other story.) But she'll handle it just fine. She's got seven galleys to mail out, to everywhere from Mexico to England. And a book about threesomes to publish.