Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam says that when he saw, posted on an academic website, a “Call for Papers — Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets,” his “beeswax detector went off.” As he writes in his column, “There can’t really be two professors planning to publish a book working from ‘the premise that public toilets, far from being banal or simply functional, are highly charged spaces, shaped by notions of propriety, hygiene and the binary gender division’ . . . can there?” As it turns out, there can. The book is being co-edited by Olga Gershenson, an assistant professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Barbara Penner of University College-London, author of two journal essays on the topic, “‘A world of unmentionable suffering: Women’s public conveniences in Victorian London” and “Female urinals: Taking a stand.” Beam talks with one of the contributors, Dr. Clara Greed of the University of the West of England, “Just back from the WTO meeting in Shanghai — ‘the other WTO,’ she explained, ‘the World Toilet Organization‘” Greed defends the book’s importance to Beam: “It’s an Anglo-Saxon thing, or perhaps an Anglo-American thing, that this research seems like a joke. But it’s a very serious issue because everybody needs to go to the toilet.”