Sappho. by LYDIS, Mariette, illustrator. Henri CREUZEVAULT, binder

Folio (323 × 245 mm), 15 etched erotic plates, all signed by Lydis in pencil, with facing text in Greek and French, plus a final double-page key/colophon sheet with each of the images in miniature, title and justification leaf, original wrappers preserved. Contemporary tan goatskin by Henri Creuzevault (signed) with a bold geometric design of fifteen horizontal bands and rectangles in relief, spine lettered in gilt. Slipcase and chemise (rubbed, the spine of the latter slightly cracked). A superb copy.

First edition, in a superb geometric binding by Henri Creuzevault. This is copy III of 5 copies on vieux japon (of a total edition of only 45 copies, the remainder on japon imperial), bound without the additional suite on chine. All the plates are signed in pencil. Sappho is one of Mariette Lydis’s rarest books, and among the most provocative, with its large format plates demonstrating her mastery of the etched line. Still under-appreciated and under-represented in institutional collections, Lydis is one of the most intriguing artistic figures of her era. Her youth in bourgeois Jewish Vienna was followed by travels across Europe, Africa and later England, the USA and South America. She settled in Paris in the 1920s (later describing the city as ‘the only place where it is possible to forget the brutality of men’) where she embraced the fluidity of culture and sexuality she found there. Though married three times (the last to publisher Giuseppe Govone, with whom she jointly published Sappho) she was openly bisexual. Her flight from Europe to Argentina in 1940 and subsequent isolation from European collectors and artistic movements perhaps served to obscure the astonishing range of her graphic art in the twenties and thirties.

The contemporary binding of this copy is an especially striking example of the art deco architectural style of Henri Creuzevault (1905-1971), among the most prominent and celebrated Parisian binders of the immediate pre-war era. Camille Creuzevault illustrates an almost identical binding on a copy of Pierre Louys’ Aphrodite of 1936 (Henri Creuzevault, II, 59). ‘Henri Creuzevault intended to be a painter but in 1918 he learned the craft of leather-gilding and then entered the binding studio of his father Louis Lazare Creuzevault. During his military service in the Middle East in 1925, he again took up painting and drawing. The following year, back in his father's studio, he drew his first sketches and exhibited his bindings at the Musée Galliera where he won first prize in 1928. Creuzevault’s art, always highly rigorous, developed throughout his life. His early style was fairly sober and traditional, progressing in the 1930s to compositions in the style of Art Deco, and 10 years later returning to an austere Classicism before the production of his bold works of the 1950s... ’ (Benezit).

Worldcat lists copies at Cornell, Harvard and Bibliothèque nationale only (there are also copies at Edinburgh University and the National Gallery of Scotland).