There's certainly an interesting story in how that book got published (from wikipedia):

>Sade wrote it in secrecy while imprisoned in the Bastille in 1785; shortly after he was transferred elsewhere the Bastille was attacked by revolutionaries, leading him to believe the work was destroyed, but unbeknownst to him it was instead recovered and preserved by a mysterious figure and subsequently handed over to a multitude of people, culminating in its publication in 1904.