Think of a man with Barney Stinson's talent for getting girls in bed, Mick Jagger's celebrity and Bill Gates' bank account. Now, suppose this guy wrote an autobiography thinly disguised as a fictional work, detailing most of his own dirty secrets and alluding to dozens more. Would you read it?

That guy is George Gordon, a.k.a. Lord Byron, and the scandalicious story is his Don Juan. Written between 1818 and Byron's untimely death in 1824, and spanning 16 cantos (chapters in a long poetic narrative), this enticing epic is sure to give you more bang for your buck than the average skin mag or gossip rag.

To begin with, Byron was unique in that he took his cue from the Augustinian satires of the late 1700s, rather than writing typical Romantic poetry, à la flowery revelations about nature. Distil the Jay Z vs. Nas feud, when two of our hottest rappers lyrically dissed each other, into pretentious iambic pentameter, and you'll get the spirit of Don Juan's intro.

The intro, a mock dedication to Robert Southey, then poet laureate of England and da bomb on the literary scene, presents Byron's chief problem with Southey to be that he writes "such set trash of phrase" and has no balls. Byron slams Southey by calling him a flying fish that tried to be a bird and fell "gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob/And fall, for lack of moisture, quite adry, Bob!" Over-the-top for an insult? Totally. 'A dry bob' was Cockney slang for sex where the guy couldn't ejaculate.

I'll give you a running translation of Byron's acts into modern terms. Byron trashes the premier poets of England — Wordsworth and Coleridge — as a bunch of ugly prudes whose "bays may hide the baldness of (their) brows" and "virtuous blushes." Think of a young rocker punk busting onto the concert stage and screaming out everyone from Elton to Turner. As a total libertine, he also cussed out the political views of others as well, saying that John Milton, the Elvis of poetry, would never "obey/the intellectual eunuch Castlereagh." Umm, hello hot topic. Castlereagh was as popular for supporting the exploitation of the Irish as Bush is for ordering the war in Afghanistan. If Castlereagh is a eunuch, Byron supposes the Tory poets must be total castrati for following the guy. Ooh, burn. Better remember that one for the next election.

Curiously, his publisher John Murray censored the intro until Byron's death for fear of legal reprisal. Hmm. I wonder why.

Oh well. The 16 published cantos of Don Juan were enough on their lonesome to shock the British public, principally because they give a blow-by-blow of the Byron family scandals. No paparazzi to post your latest conquest in the Toronto Sun? No fear, welcome to the do-it-yourself tabloid. The edgy descriptors applied to Don Juan's family in the first canto could equally be applied to Byron's relations. The marital discord between Don Juan's parents, Donna Inez and Don José, corresponds directly to that between Byron's parents, Mad Jack and Catherine Gordon, and moreover, to his own uneasy marriage with Annabella Milbanke. Byron and Annabella suffered through the extremes of sexual attraction and personal incompatibility. Where Annabella was a gifted mathematician with a rigid morality, Byron was a gifted philanderer with a rigid member.

As a side-note, I can't say I sympathize with Byron. Dude, you went to Oxford. And she studied in her dad's library and has your head spinning in circles? If she's at fault, it's for being stupid enough to marry you, you sloppy, misogynistic prick.

At any rate, Annabella (and her poetic doppelganger, Donna Inez) finally found a way out of her marital difficulties. "For Inez," like Annabella, "call'd some druggists and physicians/And tried to prove her loving lord was mad,/but as he had some lucid intermissions/she next decided he was only bad."

From that point in Don Juan, Donna Inez becomes the counterpart of Byron's mother, Catherine Gordon, and Byron becomes reincarnated in the young Don Juan. Byron despised his mother as he hated "a dumpy woman" and ragged on her for being too fat and short to catch him in any youthful misdemeanors. As a boy, she tried to censor his classical education, which, if you've read any Greek lit, is a bit like trying to cut all the sex scenes from True Blood. Pornography for learned men back then often consisted of classics written in languages that their wives conveniently couldn't read — unless they were prodigies like Annabella.

With such an admirable education in lovemaking, Byron and Don Juan spend the next 15 cantos deflowering half of Europe (the female half, in Juan's case). Presumably they would have spent several more doing so, had Byron not died while in self-imposed exile from his notoriety in England, while leading the Greeks in a war for independence.

It's difficult to give a quick and concise Playboy interview of Byron in regard to his life and character, but to sum it up, he was a dick. His neglect led to the death of at least one of his illegitimate children, Allegra, and there is no record of him providing any child support for his other by-blows. Women obsessed over his infidelities; at least one, Margarita Cogni, committed suicide after an argument. Where most of the men his age took a tour of Europe to learn their history, he turned the Grand Tour into a sex tour.

That being said, he was brave and loyal in battle, a major British poet, and good enough in bed that most women were willing to overlook his other faults. His less salacious stories were guilty pleasure reading like Twilight for young ladies such as Marianne of Austen's Sense and Sensibility. In fact, the precursor to modern vampire fiction was a novel written by his manservant John Polidori and based on Byron's character.

So next time you check out Robert Pattinson, try checking Don Juan out of the library. Enjoy.