A great book, it is truthfully said, is more than a story. It is also an idea and it is equally true that the better the story, the greater the idea. Some of the most influential novels in modern literary history can also be ranked among some of the most boring. But they all affected the way people live and did so in a way that permeates our culture and language to this day.

For every 1984 there is a Dune; for every Catch 22 there is a Dice Man. And no matter how many beatniks were set on their way by Kerouac’s On The Road, it is somewhat sobering to think that the Beat Generation’s greatest contribution may well have been the invention of text-speak, spelling, and punctuation, half a century before there was a need for it.

In general terms and for obvious reasons, modern sexuality has pulled considerably less from literature than it has from other, more obvious arts. Yet there are a handful of erotic books whose principles have left a lasting effect upon the way we wriggle.

Some two dozen different titles in John Norman’s Gor chronicles are single handedly responsible for a socio-sexual culture whose adherents range from anthropological petrie dishes to Cro-Magnon throwbacks (“me see girl, me like girl”); Anne-Rice-writing-as-AN-Roquelaurie effectively kick started the modern fascination for sexually explicit bodice rippers that are not your grandmother’s Harlequin romances.

And then there is The Story of O, a comparatively thin novel written for a bet in 1953 by a woman best known for translating modern classics into French, and the book that not only bought BDSM out of the closet and into the daylight, but also the foundation upon which most modern BDSM writings, teachings and practices were erected. And the fact that, like the Gor books, a lot of the people who claim to live by it have probably not read more than half a page of the cliff notes only amplifies the point. A great book is more than a story. It is an idea.

Anne Desclos was a leading light in post-war French literary circles when her employer (and lover) Jean Paulhan wagered that a woman could not write a convincing erotic novel. Desclos responded with L’Histoire of O, a book that even France considered so shocking that, while attempts to prosecute its publisher for obscenity were unsuccessful, the book itself vanished underground for almost a decade. Desclos’ identity, meanwhile, remained hidden for 40 years; not until the mid-1990s, four years before her death, did Desclos reveal that she was Pauline Réage.

The first English-language edition appeared in 1965. It was the early 1980s, however, before anything approaching a mass market edition appeared on US bookshelves, by which time two generations of readers had grown up knowing only of O by reputation - a reputation that was both perpetuated and enlarged by the difficulty of the quest to find a copy. And when one was finally obtained, it was accompanied by the revelation that almost everything they had heard about O was either wrong or very wrong.

And that, too, speaks volumes for its impact, the fact that entire new stories could (and have) been written, simply by mistelling the true Story of O.