Playboy.com: Your latest book is selling out all around the world. Yet it isn't available in Europe -- England in particular. Why is that?

Moore: There was a copyright issue. The Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital was gifted something by [Peter Pan] author J.M. Barrie. I believe their position is that they were given the rights to Peter Pan in perpetuity, although that does run out in this country on January 1, 2008. Now the rights and wrongs of who owns the copyrights notwithstanding, if it's evil pornographers versus a hospital for sick children, you're backing a loser from the start by going with us. We thought it would be best to simply wait until 2008. Also it did turn out that Great Ormond Street had objected to having the J.M. Barrie characters connected with a work that involved sex. They said this was why they didn't want to be associated with Lost Girls.

Now whether they also sent a lot of writs winging across the Atlantic to Michael Jackson's house when he decided to change its name to Neverland, I don't know. I'd like to think that they did. Or perhaps when Walt Disney decided to overtly sexualize Peter Pan by casting a kind of nano-scale Marilyn Monroe Tinker Bell. Putting all that aside, that was their stated reason for not wishing Lost Girls to appear. However, it did turn out that they were also planning on publishing their own sequel to Peter Pan, which apparently does feature Wendy as a grown-up woman and various references to the First World War, so that could have played some part in them not wanting our book out in competition -- although I don't really think they're for the same market. One is a children's book and one is Lost Girls. That said, it's not going to hurt us to hold out for another year in England and Europe.

Playboy.com: How did you eventually decide on this format for the book?

Moore: My wife Melinda said, "This is my absolute mad dream of how these books should look." We wanted to send out a strong signal that this should be treated as art, that it was not throwaway or sleazy or any of the other things that the readership might expect pornography to be. Melinda was very insistent that it be produced in this beautiful format that was redolent of the very best children's books of the late Victorian era, the early 20th century. Given that we were talking about in some instances quite hardcore pornography, we saw no reason why this shouldn't be dressed up in an incredibly refined and beautiful fashion.

Playboy.com: There's a line in the book that puts forth a "make love not war" mantra. Was this a conscious decision?

Moore: One of the things that we remarked upon after finishing the book was what a profoundly '60s agenda Lost Girls was actually carrying out, even though it was coming out in 2006. If you look at the elements of Lost Girls, it's got Victorian children's fantasy characters like Alice in Wonderland, who was very big during the '60s. That Lewis Carroll imagery was very popular. You've got flowers everywhere. It's dripping with art nouveau, which of course was something that was also true of the psychedelic era. Its basic message is very pro-erotic. It has a fairly relaxed attitude to drugs, which was also true of much of the '60s. Its basic message is, "Make love not war." I've remarked to Melinda that if we'd just thought of that before we started on the book we could have just bought ourselves one of those badge-making machines and saved ourselves the trouble of spending 17 years doing a 240-page, lavishly illustrated book. We've tried to explain why sex is a normal, healthy human urge. The sexual imagination is a normal part of healthy human life. Actually, going to some foreign hellhole and getting killed or killing people who are just the same as you other than an accident of geography -- that is not natural. Yes, they're things we've been doing a long time, but it doesn't mean they're natural and it doesn't mean that they're right.