How I came to write The Book That Kills

The novice confesses the immoral life he has led

I came to write The Book That Kills because I found an anonymous  erotic volume in French in my garage loft here on the border of Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire, when we moved into this sixteenth century courthouse in 1995. I have no idea how it came to be here, and it remains a complete mystery. It provided the start of The Book that Kills, by giving me the idea of a lost work with dangerous content, some of which, translated, I have included.  The 24 engravings are explicitly sexual, beautifully executed, and I toyed for a long while as to whether I should use them as illustrations, even writing captions for inclusion at suitable points in the text. Finally I decide against, but there is a case to be made that they should be included in a future edition, and I have kept the illustrations on disc.
      I found only a leading Dutch antiquarian bookseller who has a later edition of the same work, more in demand for its rarity, in his sale list for € 17,000. The British Library has only a mutilated edition, with three of the twenty-four illustrations in my copy. Recently I put my copy up for sale by auction at Christie’s, and received rather less.

Here is an essay DE  SADE AND HIS PRESENT DAY FOLLOWERS— by the narrator Patrice Léon of  The Book That Kills.

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