The book includes an anthology of illustrative material, quoting extracts from publications banned at various times and for various reasons. Pages from such books as Venus in the Cloister are reprinted for the first time in more than two centuries, while the other documents range from the Blasphemy Act of 1698 to a prosecution brought under the Race Relations Act of 1965.
Donald Thomas was an academic historian of crime. He was the author of several studies of the criminal underworld as well as biographies of Robert Browning, the Marquis de Sade, Henry Fielding, and Lewis Carroll.