Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden.
My name is Anna Tajinsky, I am here with Andrew Hunter Murray and this week we are joined by two great pillars of QI.
The producer of QI, Piers Fletcher, and one of QI's longest serving,
been there for a million years, researchers and historian Justin Pollard.
And once again we've gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts in the last seven days and in no particular order here we go,
starting with you Justin.
Okay, so the first person recorded ever buying a pornographic book in England was Samuel Peaks.
So how was he recorded?
Typically idiotically he managed to record it himself
because you know Peaks wrote this sort of ten year diary which is great
because he records a great fire of London and the plague and all sorts of big events but the main use of it is he records the details of his everyday life and he wrote in his diary that he'd seen the idle roguish book Le Chole de Fille which I have bought in Plainbinding and he takes it home and he reads it but then he promises himself in his diary which is written in shorthand so nobody else can read it,
that as soon as I've read it I will burn it which as far as we know he did,
there's only one copy left of this book in the world.
So he burned it in order to save himself the embarrassment of having it found among his collection but then he recorded the fact that he'd read it in his diary.
He failed to clear his browser history.
When he bought it he wrote in his diary, well I was thinking about getting it because it's in French,
maybe it would be a good translation tool for my wife and then I think he saw what was in it and thought maybe not.
Yeah but the great thing is that he found it and then he went away for a month nearly.
He's obviously been bragging on his mind,