As a card-carrying Borders aficionado (credit card, that is), I have the pleasure of letting those $5.00 Borders bucks coupons accumulate every month. Recently, I grabbed a pile of them, went to my local store, and bought Susie Bright’s new anthology, X: The Erotic Treasury. It was pricey at $35.00 dollars, but it’s not your average erotic anthology. It’s something more. It’s high-end.

High-end erotica. Sounds like “high-priced callgil.” In a way, it is.

It’s beautifully packaged book. First, it’s hardcover, which is pretty well unheard of for erotic fiction. Its boards have an onlay, a repeating floral pattern of black against a minutely speckled scarlet, and its endsheets carry the same pattern, white on black. Most exquisitely, it’s slipcased. Yes, slipcased. In 1/8th-inch boards that not only repeat the same floral pattern (but in scarlet on black), but with a large die-cut into its side.

The only thing missing in this baby is a colophon.

Susie’s book left me with a damn good case of book lust, and I’d like to see more high-end work like it. But that’s a tall wish — the publishing industry has been hit badly by the economic slide. Still, makes me think about my early years of book collecting when, as a recent college graduate, I was more likely to spend my money on a Donald Grant or a later-edition Arkham House title than a skirt or blouse for work.

I think about how fans of science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction have a long history of small presses producing beautiful, limited edition books* and how they’ve supported them with their hard-earned dollars. If only erotica’s fan were like that, I’ve often wished. Of course, I know that’s unfair to those of you who love erotic fiction. We’ve never had an infrastructure like those genres — no conventions, no fanzines, not even a lasting history of support from the Big Houses of Publishing. It’s impossible to have a high end without infrastructure support.

But I’d love to see erotic fiction get its day in the sun, a day bright enough to support everything from the high end to common mass market paperback. (And e-book!) I’d love to have a shelf of attractive, finely-produced books of erotic fiction in my library.

I hope Susie’s book is just the start of it.

X: The Erotic Treasury is not a limited edition work.