''Playboy's Book of Forbidden Words'' was first published in 1972 by

Playboy Press PLBY Group, Inc. is an American global media and lifestyle company founded by Hugh Hefner as Playboy Enterprises, Inc. to oversee the ''Playboy'' magazine and related assets. Its headquarters are in Los Angeles, California. The company is focus ...

and distributed by

Simon & Schuster Simon & Schuster () is an American publishing company and a subsidiary of Paramount Global. It was founded in New York City on January 2, 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. As of 2016, Simon & Schuster was the third largest publ ...

. Written by

Robert Anton Wilson Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson; January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was an American author, futurist, psychologist, and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized within Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilson ...

, it is sub-titled ''A liberated dictionary of improper English, containing over 700 uninhibited definitions of

erotic Eroticism () is a quality that causes sexual feelings, as well as a philosophical contemplation concerning the aesthetics of sexual desire, sensuality, and romantic love. That quality may be found in any form of artwork, including painting, scul ...

and

scatological In medicine and biology, scatology or coprology is the study of feces. Scatological studies allow one to determine a wide range of biological information about a creature, including its diet (and thus where it has been), health and diseases su ...

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 The Rape of the Sabine Women ( ), also known as the Abduction of the Sabine Women or the Kidnapping of the Sabine Women, was an incident in Roman mythology in which the men of Rome committed a mass abduction of young women from the other citi ...

". Claiming ignorance and inexperience, he had not 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 Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavi ...

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''.

References

1972 non-fiction books Books by Robert Anton Wilson English dictionaries Playboy Press books {{Ref-book-stub book-stub