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Erotica

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(PERRY, James, answer to). ‘LOVEJOY, Lucretia’, pseudonym. ~ An Elegy on the lamented Death of the Electrical Eel, or Gymnotus Electricus. With the lapidary Inscription, as placed on a superb Erection, at the Expence of the countess of H———, and Chevalier-Madame d’Eon de De Beaumont. By Lucretia Lovejoy, Sister to Mr. Adam Strong, Author of The Electrical Eel. London: T. Hookham, Hanover-Street, and J. Bew, Paternoster-Row, 1779.

A rare satirical elegy and epitaph for the celebrated electrical eel, who could no longer rise to the occasion.  more...

A reissue of the sheets of the first edition of 1777 with a cancel title, of this elaborate addition to the corpus of salacious 1770s pamphlets devoted to the subject of the electrical eel, a topic of serious scientific enquiry and popular merriment. This one continues the phallic joke and manages to draw in the hapless Chevalier D’Eon (whose sex was then popularly debated) alongside the lecherous Earl of Harrington.

‘If the Gymnotus Electricus, lately exhibited to the Public, be really dead, it is to be hoped that we shall have no more of these witty indecencies’ (Monthly Review, Nov. 1777)..  see full details

£2100

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[PERRY, James] ‘Adam STRONG’, [pseudonym]. ~ The Electrical Eel: or, Gymnotus electricus. Inscribed to the Honourable Members of the R***l S*****y, by Adam Strong [pseud.], Naturalist. London: Printed for J. Bew... 1777.

First edition.  more...

‘A satirical poem on the amours of various members of the nobility’ (ESTC) or, as the Monthly Review succinctly put it: ‘Poetical smut. Rochester revived.’ A number of imitations and replies were elicited. It is early work by Perry (formerly ‘Pirie’, 1756–1821), a Scottish journalist recently arrived in London ‘to try to break into the literary world’ (Oxford DNB). By the end of his career he had become ‘one of the most notable journalists of the age when the newspaper press was becoming established as a force in the country’ (ibid.)

Studies of Gymnotus electricus by members of Royal Society and their correspondents had captured the imagination of the British public in unexpected ways. While the investigations of Walsh and Hunter made genuine discoveries into the nature of electricity (which culminated in the invention of Volta’s battery), contemporary wits and pamphleteers took advantage of the phallic connotations of the eel and its electrical properties to deride the sexual peregrinations of London society.

In this copy several of the printed lacunae have been filled in by a contemporary hand, identifying Lady Sarah Bunbury and Lady Grafton, among others, as devotees of the electrical eel..  see full details

£1500

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[COPPER PLATE ~ for an unidentified erotic work. France or Belgium, nineteenth century].

An engraved copper plate for an erotic work.  more...

A young man, his erect member exposed, stands on an armchair while observing an amorous couple through a large barred window.  see full details

£300

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(CASANOVA, Giacomo). Josèphe VERHEYEN, illustrator. ~ Fünf Episoden. Mit zehn Originallithographien von Josèphe Verheyen. Vienna: Eros-Presse, 1923.

One of 1000 copies (number 716).  more...

The German translation by Heinrich Conrad. .  see full details

£500

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RESTIF DE LA BRETONNE, Nicolas-Edme. ~ Le Pornographe, ou Idées d’un honnête-homme sur un projet de réglement pour les prostituées, propre à prévenir les Malheurs qu’occasionne le Publicisme des Femmes: avec des notes historiques et justificatives. ‘Londres, chez Jean Nourse... A La Haye, chez Gosse junior, & Pinet’ [but Paris: Delalain,] 1769.

First edition, second issue (Londres and La Haye imprint).  more...

Intended as the first of a projected series of works with the general title Idées singulières, Le Pornographe is an important early manifesto for the regulation of prostitution. It also holds a significant place in the historical etymology of pornography: meaning literally ‘one who writes about prostitutes’, being the first modern coinage of a word used by the ancient Greeks.

Restif issued the work anonymously, presenting it with a preface claiming that the idea was not a French invention at all but one found in the manuscript of an Englishman by the name of Lewis Moore. In a series of letters, the work presents an anatomy of prostitution, noting its inevitability in cities such as Paris and its dangers to public health and morality. Most interestingly, it then outlines a system of regulations, with well-managed maisons publiques, in which prostitutes are required to stay, where they are protected and cared for and where customers are strictly controlled. A major pre-occupation is the contemporary anxiety over the (wrongly) perceived decline in population, a decline to which prostitution was seen to have contributed. Restif proposes that pregnant prostitutes be required to fulfil their pregnancies and that their children should be brought up and educated within the maisons publiques and to take up alternative professions when of age.

This early work by Restif encapsulates both his social realism his utopian aspirations, both of which became major aspects of his later novels.

The imprint is false and the work was published in Paris by Delalain, who sold the author’s works, but who deleted his own name from the imprint after the first impression. The two issues are identical save for the title-page..  see full details

£1500

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MUSSET, Alfred de. Léon COURBOULEIX, illustrator. ~ La Mouche. [Paris: sur la presses-à-bras par l’artiste, c. 1930].

First edition with these illustrations, an attractive production with text and plates engraved throughout With an original signed drawing.  more...

Example 22 of 35 copies on Arches, (there are a further 60 copies on vélin and 5 on Japon). Musset’s 1853 witty story of amorous intrigues with Madame de Pompadour at the court of Louis XV..  see full details

£650

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MAC-ORLAN, Pierre Ch[arles]. Jean PICART LE DOUX, illustrator. ~ L’Écharpe de suie. Paris: Éditions de la Couronne, [ 1947].

FIRST EDITION with these illustrations.  more...

Number 56 of 100 examples on pur fil du Marais, with an additional suite (total edition 176). An erotic book by the bohemian novelist and songwriter Mac-Orlan; illustrated in pochoir by Picart Le Doux, an impressionist artist who created washy and seductive night-scenes, most of which are depictions of prostitutes. He was well-known for his female nudes, was friends with Renoir, and also illustrated works by Verlaine and Baudelaire. He was best known as a tapestry designer..  see full details

£600

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LOUŸS, Pierre. Antoine CALBET, illustrator. ~ Aphrodite. Paris: Albin Michel, [ 1927].

1 OF 70 COPIES, this one unnumbered, but with plates in two states.  more...

A large-format illustrated edition of the quintessential and much-published decadent novel of courtesan life in Alexandria, the illustrations typical of the work of Calbet (they had first appeared in the edition of 1923)..  see full details

£600

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MAGRE, Maurice. Édouard CHIMOT, illustrator. ~ Les Belles de nuit illustré de dix-huit eaux-fortes originales… Paris [Coulouma for]: Les Éditions d’art Devambez, 1927.

FIRST ILLUSTRATED EDITION, one of 17 on Japon impérial (total edition 426) with an original signed drawing.  more...

Magre (1877-1941) had lived a colourful and bohemian life, Figaro remarking in 1924: ‘Magre est un anarchiste, un individualiste, un sadique, un opiomane. Il a tous les défauts, c'est un très grand écrivain. Il faut lire son œuvre’. After 1919 he became a devotee of the theosophist teachings of Madame Blavatsky. Chimot was perhaps the natural illustrator for the decadent poems of Belles de nuit (first published 1913)..  see full details

£1850

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LACHIZE, Henri. Charles THÉVENIN, illustrator. ~ Une Amazone sous le Premier Empire. Vie d’Ida St-Elme. Paris: [Macon: Protat frères for] Charles Carrington, 1902.

First edition, one of 100 copies on vergé d’Arches with plates in three states (of a total edition of 500).  more...

A biographical study of the famous military transvestite, Ida St-Elme who served as a man in the French Imperial armies. It is based on her autobiography Mémoires d'une contemporaine (1829). This is rather atypical of Carrington’s productions—the quality of typography and illustration far higher than that of his more surreptitious erotic publications..  see full details

£200

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MIRABEAU, Gabriel-Honoré de Riquetti, comte de. ~ Erotika Biblion… Nouvelle édition, corrigée sur un exemplaire revu par l’Auteur. Paris: Vatar-Jouannet, ‘chez tous les marchands de nouveautés’, ‘An IX’, 1801.

Written in prison and first published in 1783, Mirabeau’s learned but witty treatise on the varieties of sexuality in antiquity was immediately banned and issued in very few copies (traditionally only 14).  more...

Later editions continued to provoke the censor and are also rare. In this Paris edition, a near-contemporary reader has inserted notes on the early publication of the text, the opinion that Mirabeau presents ‘des tableaux plus licentieux que ceux de l’Aretin’, and Greek transliterations of chapter headings, with definitions.

Pia’s A-342 conforms to this edition, save for the spelling of the first word of the title. Pia gives ‘Errotika’ as in all previous editions, while ours reads ‘Erotika’. This may therefore be Pia’s error, and may also suggest ours is the first edition to bear the modernised title spelling customary in all later editions..  see full details

£700

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(CARRINGTON, Charles, publisher). PETRONIUS. ~ The Satyricon of Petronius. [Nijmegen: Thieme for Charles Carrington in Paris, 1902].

First Carrington edition, one of 440 copies on handmade paper (of a total edition of 515), this copy with the pasted overslip on the title reading: ‘Important notice.  more...

The present translation was done direct from the original Latin by “Sebastian Melmoth” (Oscar Wilde).’ --- a spurious claim. With its overtly homosexual themes, the Satyricon, was certainly important to Wilde (he even refers to it explicitly in A Picture of Dorian Gray) but Carrington’s scurrilous claim has always been disputed. It is only relatively recently, however, that an explicit retraction forced upon Carrington was found in an insert published (ironically) with his 1909 edition of Dorian Gray. Only a proportion of the edition contains the overslip pasted over Carrington’s name. In our copy the final advert leaf with colophon giving the printer’s name has been carefully and deliberately removed, perhaps before binding. The binding here is identical to that of the Eccles copy preserved in the British Library, thus suggestive of a publisher’s binding..  see full details

£500

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(LISEUX, Isidore, publisher). SINISTRARI, Ludovico Maria. ~ Peccatum mutum (the mute Sin, alias Sodomy) a theological Treatise. For the first Time translated from the Latin of Father Sinistrari. Paris: Isidore Liseux, 1893.

First edition in English.  more...

Liseux was a pioneering figure in the publication of clandestine literature in English, working from Paris, but evidently supplying an English market. His publications were frequently scholarly texts in the history of sexuality and found their way onto the shelves of bibliophiles and collectors of erotica. Not generally been noted, the title here finds an echo the following year with the famous phrase ’The love that dare not speak its name’ in the poem ‘Two Loves’ by Lord Alfred Douglas, published in 1894, later discussed at length in the Wilde trial..  see full details

£500

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(HOTTEN, John Camden, publisher). ‘COLEMAN, George’ [pseud.] ~ The Rodiad. ‘London: Cadell & Murray, 1810’ [but John Camden Hotten, c. 1871].

First edition, very scarce.  more...

Spuriously attributed to George Coleman the younger, but actually a new work, perhaps attributable to Richard Mockton Milnes. The head of the title bears the ‘Library illustrative of Social Progress’ headline. The publisher Hotten ‘had a particular line in flagellation literature, which ranged from A History of the Rod (1870) to a collection of mostly eighteenth-century flagellation pamphlets under the general title of Library Illustrative of Social Progress (1873)’ (Oxford DNB). This rare 1871 edition was of 250 copies only; it was reprinted in 1898..  see full details

£600

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(CASANOVA, Giacomo). [BERTHOLD, Max]. ~ [Album zu den Memoiren des Jacob Casanova von Seingalt Leipzig: Hartmann, 1872].

A rare suite of plates depicting the amorous exploits of Casanova, giving them a notably Germanic flavour: fleshy if not very explicit.  more...

Each plate is captioned (’Casanova und Bettina’, ‘Casanova und Lucia’, ‘Casanova, Marton und Nanette’ etc) and the first bears the initials M.B. and date, 1872)..  see full details

£450

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[ANCILLON, Charles]. ~ Traité des Eunuques, dans lequel on explique toutes les différentes sortes d’eunuques… On éxamine principalement s’ils sont propres au mariage, & s’il leur doit être permis de se marier… ?Berlin, [ 1707].

First edition of this extraordinary treatise on the status of eunuchs in society, according to civil and canon law.  more...

Largely based on classical sources, history and (most interestingly) anecdotal evidence from the Orient, Ancillon considers the reasons for the phenomenon (including slavery, household, employment or punishment for sexual misdemeanour). The major contention is that while civil law permits a eunuch to marry, canon law should forbid it (as it did) on the grounds that a marriage could not be consummated. Along the way Ancillon recounts numerous anecdotes of famous eunuchs, notably Abelard, castrated at the instigation of Heloise’s family.

The book was later translated into English by Robert Samber as part of Edmund Curll’s Eunuchism display’d (1718).

This copy of Traité des Eunuques is one of at least two issues of the same year with slightly different paginations and title ornaments. The ‘Epitre dedicatoire’ is signed: ‘C. d’Ollincan’ an anagram of the author’s real name..  see full details

£500

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[PERRY, reply to.] ~ The Old Serpent’s Reply to the Electrical Eel… London: Printed for M. Smith, and sold by the Booksellers... L,DCC,LXXVII [i.e. 1777].

Sole edition.  more...

In the Monthly Review’s opinion: ‘A fruitless attempt to catch the Eel of Wit by the tail.’ With allusions to Wilkes, Garrick, and Catherine the Great, among others..  see full details

£250

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[PERRY, James]. ~ The Electrical Eel: or, Gymnotus electricus. Inscribed to the Honourable Members of the R***l S*****y, by Adam Strong [pseud.], Naturalist. A new Edition, with considerable Additions… London: Printed for J. Bew... 1777.

‘A satirical poem on the amours of various members of the nobility’ (ESTC) or, as the Monthly Review succinctly put it: ‘Poetical smut.  more...

Rochester revived.’ A number of imitations and replies were elicited. It is early work by Perry (formerly ‘Pirie’, 1756–1821), a Scottish journalist recently arrived in London ‘to try to break into the literary world’ (Oxford DNB). By the end of his career he had become ‘one of the most notable journalists of the age when the newspaper press was becoming established as a force in the country’ (ibid.)

Studies of Gymnotus electricus by members of Royal Society and their correspondents had captured the imagination of the British public in unexpected ways. While the investigations of Walsh and Hunter made genuine discoveries into the nature of electricity (which culminated in the invention of Volta’s battery), contemporary wits and pamphleteers took advantage of the phallic connotations of the eel and its electrical properties to deride the sexual peregrinations of London society.

ESTC lists 4 editions of 1777. This ‘new edition’ is enlarged form the first, but probably preceded the stated ‘third’ edition, with a much enlarged pagination..  see full details

£450

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DOUGLAS, Norman. ~ Paneros. Some words on aphrodisiacs and the like. Florence: [Tipografia Giuntina] ‘privately printed for subscribers by G. Orioli, Lungarno Corsini’, [ 1930].

First edition, privately printed.  more...

The limitation notice reads ‘This Edition is issued to Subscribers only and limited to two hundred and fifty copies, numbered and signed by the Author. The price will be doubled after first of March, 1931’. This copy is, however, unsigned and unnumbered. The work forms issue no. 5 of The Lugano Series.

‘From 1920 until 1937 Douglas was settled in Florence... As his fame grew, he became much visited by inter-war writers, and forged close friendships with D. H. Lawrence and Bryher. During these years he lived with the publisher Giuseppe (Pino) Orioli, who helped him publish several limited editions, most of which were later commercially published in London... In 1937 Douglas was forced to flee Florence after the police made enquiries concerning his friendship with a ten-year-old local girl’ (Katherine Mullin in Oxford DNB).
.  see full details

£75

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OVIDIUS NASO, Publius. ~ Ovid’s Art of Love, in three books. Together with his amours, and remedy of love. Translated into English verse, by several eminent hands. To which are added, The Court of Love, a tale from Chaucer. And the History of Love. Adorn’d with cutts. London: printed for J. Tonson; and sold by W. Taylor at the Ship in Pater-noster Row, 1719.

A scarce early edition.  more...

Three editions had previously been published, the first in 1709, and this popular title went on to be republished numerous times during the eighteenth century. The translators are identified in the text as John Dryden, Nahum Tate and William Congreve. 'The history of love' is by Charles Hopkins and 'The court of love' is a metrical paraphrase by Arthur Maynwaring..  see full details

£400

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