It's hard to believe this has never been done, but here it is, six years in the making, with 546 entries from 400 contributors, covering erotica from every nook and cranny of the world. The delight of the two-volume masterwork is not in the usual suspects but entries such as those on linguist Gershon Legman (master of the dirty joke), the use of furniture in erotic fiction (the money shot is its collapse) and Charles Fourier, who before his death in 1837 predicted that orgies would someday consist of sex combined with art -- an idea so radical it was kept out of print until 1966. The volumes make for great bedtime reading, but they are heavy, so you'll need both hands.

We spoke with Gaëtan Brulotte, a professor of French literature at the University of South Florida, about the project.

PLAYBOY: Let's start with an easy one: What's the difference between erotica and pornography?

BRULOTTE: Ha! This could take an hour. We used the word erotica because pornography is a troubled concept and a troubled term. It is most frequently used by censors, including against works such as Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover that were considered pornographic in their time but today are hardly seen as a threat to public morals. Besides, whether sex talk is obscene is not our point. The encyclopedia includes literature covering all types of sexuality, gay and straight, plus many things such as necrophilia that are considered perversions.

PLAYBOY: What was the genesis of the idea?

BRULOTTE: I wrote my dissertation on French erotic literature while studying in Paris under the direction of the renowned critic Roland Barthes, author of A Lover's Discourse. I knew erotic literature as a genre was despised by academia, so I wanted to look into it and see what kind of work we were talking about. Barthes was the first in the 1970s to publish daring studies on Marquis de Sade and other controversial authors. Eventually I met John Phillips, a professor of French literature and culture at London Metropolitan University, who proposed doing the encyclopedia and found a publisher in London to take it on. It took six years. We were asked to do one volume but had an outline for 1.25 million words over three. The compromise we reached with the publisher was two volumes, but it required some tough decisions.

PLAYBOY: Such as?

BRULOTTE: First, we decided to focus on text, so there are no entries for films or art. Authors who maybe didn't need a 1,000-word entry were incorporated into overviews. For instance, there was an array of French surrealists who ended up within the entry on surrealism. Still, we also included many authors who didn't specialize in erotica but incorporated sexuality in one work or another, such as Cervantes, Faulkner, Shakespeare.

PLAYBOY: You and Phillips write in the introduction, "If there are a larger number of entries relating to literature in French, it is because French writers have contributed more than any other linguistic culture to the development of the erotic genre. Pauvert called this the l'exception francaise." But a London Times reviewer said there were too many entries for French "hacks" from the 17th and 18th centuries for his taste. A fair criticism? You are both professors of French, after all.

BRULOTTE: The French have a tradition of writing erotica that dates to the Middle Ages, in part because they didn't go through lengthy, repressive eras of censorship such as in England or the U.S. or even modern China. The 18th century is the golden age of French erotic literature; it had a great influence on other cultures such as the British, so we felt the French deserved special attention. Even today French women are leading the way in sexual confessions. The French, of course, also write great love stories.

Men and women in France didn't go through the war that they did in North America when feminists took over the discourse on sexuality for a while and even promoted censorship of erotic literature.

PLAYBOY: How would you assess the state of erotic literature today?

BRULOTTE: It's pretty healthy, especially since women took over the genre. Throughout history men had the dominant position and would present female characters who had a distinctly masculine view of sex. Now women talk and write about sex extensively, and, unlike men, their vision tends to mix the amorous and the erotic. It's brought a new tone to the genre.

PLAYBOY: Can you recommend three books to someone who would like an introduction to the genre?

BRULOTTE: I would start with the French author, Vivant Denon, No Tomorrow. It's 18th century, short and very subtle. Next, I suggest a Japanese author, Yasunari Kawabata, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968. His House of Sleeping Beauties is a gem. Finally, I recommend Crébillon's The Night and the Moment, an 18th century dialogue. It's a wonder. And since we were discussing modern female authors, I would send readers to Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus. Every woman writing today has Nin as a model. This collection of short stories is beautifully written and includes quite a variety of erotic situations.