Playboy's Book of Forbidden Words was first published in 1972 by Playboy Press and distributed by Simon & Schuster. Written by Robert Anton Wilson, it is sub-titled 'A liberated dictionary of improper English, containing over 700 uninhibited definitions of erotic and scatological terms'. The paperback edition's cover featured Mercy Rooney. It is a collection of 'items' from "Abbess" to "Zoophilia Erotica".
Interviewed by "Common Ground", Vancouver (July 1999 Issue), Wilson talked about how he'd been tinkering with Playboy's Book of Forbidden Words, which he considered his best book—worst, that is, after the editors at Playboy did to the book "what the Roman Army did to the Sabine women". Claiming ignorance and inexperience, he hadn't objected at the time. If he had later rewritten the book the way he had wanted it to be the first time, he would have called it Robert Anton Wilson's Book of Black Magick and Curses. He aimed to include all the anthropological and neurolinguistic theorems that Playboy removed. Portions of this work are reprinted (reedited by Wilson with an added explanation of his problem with Playboy) in his 1988 work Coincidance.
Famous quotes containing the words book, forbidden and/or words:
“Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A really great poet is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“... there is a particular propensity in the world for people, wherever they appear in great numbers, to permit themselves collectively everything that would be forbidden them individually.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“All our words from loose using have lost their edge.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)