Booklovers loathe censorship, but they cherish the censors, thanks to whom they get to collect banned books as well as the perverse pleasure to read them. Greatest censors are also the greatest obsessive persons. They don’t only carefully index, but also gather and store the object of their desire. They even organize their strange craze for collection in the hellish forbidden books departments of the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, the Vatican Library, the Private Case of the British Library, etc.

With anecdotes and scholarly jokes, the author tells the particular fate of the greatest iconoclasts, such as Isidore Lisieux, an unfrocked priest, who published Curiosa. Finally, he deals with the contemporary censorship, the condemnation of characters, the restlessness of the moral leagues, and of the self-censorship of which it is the tool.

In Le Bonheur de vivre en Enfer, Emmanuel Pierrat insists upon the nightly aspects of his activities, the licentious bibliophilism in which he converts his fees and royalties.