B**, Monsieur. ~ Recueil des poesies de Monsieur B**. Geneve: chez les frères Cramer, libraires, 1756.
8vo (190 × 110 mm), pp. 120. Title with woodcut vignette, typographical ornaments. Contemporary mottled calf, spine gilt in compartments with floral tools, red morocco label, marbled endpapers, red edges. Slightly rubbed, head of spine chipped with slight loss. Later inscription of Jules Bobin. A very good copy.
Sole edition of a rare anonymous poetical collection, comprising heroic odes dedicated to a variety of men (and one woman) whose names are as equally disguised as the author’s and a series of shorter verses which are lightheartedly erotic and sometimes overtly pornographic. It is rare now to find a printed collection so resistant to attribution. It does not appear in the bibliographies of Cioransecu, Gay or Pia (as one might expect) and only Conlon hazards a guess at its authorship, suggesting it may be by the same ‘Monsieur B***’ to whom Rochon de Chabannes dedicated a Satyre sur les hommes, but this seems far from certain. The opening poem, ‘Épitre au Chevalier d’Har’ with a comparison of its subject to Dryden, Pope and Milton and its invocations of the names of Grafton, Mulgrave and Roscommon, may turn out to be useful for future attribution. The book bears what appears to be a genuine Geneva imprint of the Cramer brothers, official publishers of Voltaire.
None of the verses we have sampled appear to have been anthologised elsewhere, which is particularly rare for the kind of erotic poetry occupying half of the volume. Notable among these is a verse devoted to the quasi-Viagran effects of coffee, as experienced by young Alix and a cleric. Such verses were often shared among coterie writers and tend to appear in several collections, both manuscript and print — which seems not to be the case here.
This copy bears the inscription of Jules Bobin (1834-1905) bibliophile, friend and executor of Huysmans’ will — a collector who specialised in this kind of rare curiosa.
Conlon, p. 412. WorldCat locates copies at the Taylorian Institute, Oxford and Indiana only (discounting the BL copy which lacks pp. 1-66). There is also a copy at the Bn.