I found it easy to get ahold of on amazon and eBay since it has recently been reprinted by Atlas Press. There is a link to buy the hardcover here:
http://www.atlaspress.co.uk/index.cgi?a ... &number=19
I have a more complete synopsis of this book I wrote a few weeks ago:
The Tutu by Leon Genonceaux is quite possibly the vilest book I have ever read. Each character delights in the other's misfortunes, reveling in amorality, debauchery, blasphemy, cannibalism, incest, exhibitionism, infanticide and shitting. Brain, barf and booger-eating, sputum-sucking, motherfucking, skin-flaying: it's all in there. There is a lactating man. A two-headed prostitute who begets a four-headed progeny. A tree that grows people, some of them headless. The tree is watered by getting ritualistically pissed on at the roots. There is even a scene where the clergy is made decelibate and a few centimeters of an adulterer's penis is guillotined in a church brothel.
I read it mostly as novelty: this curiosity purported to be the strangest book penned in the 19th century (or indeed EVER). It did not disappoint. I voraciously devoured it much in the same spirit the protagonists ate their own vomit.
Perhaps I would have gleaned more from it had I been a French historian or Nietzschean scholar, mulling over the satirical indictment of the era's decadence and ministerial impunity.
For me, it was more of a freak show with dashes of disarmingly sincere poetry.
Obviously, this is the highest endorsement ever coming from me.
Speaking of rare book curiosities, does anyone have any leads on where I might find a copy of Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus for under £60?