"The problem is finding a disinterested authority. Anyone with a strong opinion inevitably has an ax to grind. Father Leonard Boyle, keeper of manuscripts can chief librarian at the Vatican until 1998, and a good egg by all accounts, denied it [a secret stash of forbidden pornography] in a sane, good-humored way, but then he would, wouldn’t he? By contrast the Web site of the Legion of Decency (the name’s a registered trademark) not only insists that the collection exists, it even provides shelf numbers: F2—F-1T, rows 89 to 704,969. They also say that those with a reader’s card—secior clergy only—can call the library on the Vatican in-house telephone system and have items delivered by one of thirteen young nuns in less than ten minutes. At this point in history it’s hard to believer that any library can find and deliver anything to anyone in less than ten minutes, while the notion that nuns do the delivering just sounds like feverish fancy. But I have no proof that this isn’t true. And no proof that it is."
From Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of "Erotica" by Geoff Nicholson
Looking for people who might be interested in hearing thisinterview of Geoff Nicholson for the Diet Soap podcast I found your blog. You can read a partial transcript of the interview here.