Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from the QI offices in Covenant Garden. My name is Anthaginski, I am here with Andrew

Hunter Murray and this week we are joined by two great pillars of QI, the producer of QI,

Pierce 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 microphones with our four

favourite facts in the last seven days and in no particular audit 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

he's wrote this sort of 10 year diary which is great, he records a great five 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 idol Rogish book Leshold de Fee which

I have bought in plain binding and he takes it home and he reads it but then he promises to

film in his diary which is written in in short-hand 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.

Wow 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 felt the clearest

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. It's obviously been praying on his mind he could have

said, I might just go down the strand and then eventually oh look there's that bookshop again

and he went in and then he's apparently stayed there and he hang about in the bookshop for an hour

...