Born in 1834, Henry Spencer Ashbee was a wealthy London oil merchant who channelled his fortune into knowledge – a quest that led him to the forbidden erotica traded “under the counter” in Victorian gentlemen’s clubs. Behind the locked doors of his Bedford Square mansion he built a secret library of thousands – shared only with a trusted circle of collectors. Fussy, exhaustive, and deliciously verbose in true Victorian style, his notes on each item in this contraband collection are gathered in The Complete Guide to Forbidden Books.

Originally published in 1877, under the pseudonym ‘Pisanus Fraxi’, this erotic bibliography was housed in rather austere hardback form until the 1966 publication of the Brandon House Library Edition, turning a Victorian curiosity into a sixties pulp paperback.