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A scarce and substantial brochure for a charity gala, to which Mariette Lydis contributed eight full-page illustrations (some for adverts) mainly of young girls or women. Other artistic contributors include Marie Laurencin, Raoul Dufy and Vertès and there are further contributions from Jean Cocteau, Daisy Fellowes, Arthur Honneger, Pierre Mac-Orlan, François Mauriac, André Maurois and Colette. Lydis is the largest single contributor. The Bal des petits lits was an annual fundraising event for the benefit to sick and disadvantaged children and attracted the patronage of leading artistic figures each year.

First edition with the Lydis illustrations, of Colette’s coming-of-age novel (first published in 1900-3 with debatable contribution from her then-husband, Willy). This is copy number 47 of 100 on Lafuma with plates in 2 states, after copies on Japon and Hollande, of a total edition of 1585 copies on different papers. Though not called for copies on Lafuma, this copy has four original drawings bound as frontispieces, each signed by the artist. Three of them are of Claudine herself, the fourth, a delightful cat.
There was mutual admiration (and perhaps more) between Colette and Lydis, the former having written an admiring note on the artist for the programme of the 1934 Bal des petits lits blancs, which Lydis had illustrated.

A special number, devoted entirely the art of the book around the world, which includes 2 reproductions from Lydis illustrations.

First edition. Each plate is accompanied by an exotic love lyric by Schwabach (publisher, author and patron of Expressionism) ‘Die verliebten Billete des Prinzen Salamud’. The 18 plates reproduce Lydis’ orientalist miniatures in collotype and lithograph with gold and silver. The Müller firm had been established at Potsdam 1919 by Irmgard Kiepenheuer and Hans Müller. Kiepenhauer was an important figure in the artistic world of Weimar Berlin, hosting a cultural salon in Potsdam and being in personal contact with the most important contemporary artists — including many from the Bauhaus in Weimar. The firm issued several influential portfolios showcasing artists such as Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Pechstein, Christian Rohlfs, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

A regular copy of a total edition of 1100 copies (of which 100 copies were signed). Several different publisher’s bindings exist.

First edition with illustrations by Mariette Lydis. Le Livre de Goha le simple, by two Egyptian Jewish authors, first appeared in 1919 (Calmann-Lévy) but this 1926 deluxe illustrated edition formed part of the Collection de chefs-d’oeuvre series. It was an important commission for Lydis. Goha the Fool was immensely popular, having narrowly missed the 1919 Goncourt prize (which went to Proust that year). ‘It is possible to see the beginning of Levantine literature ― rooted in the realities of the Middle East and influenced by European culture ― in Goha le Simple … This sad and cynical love story, which employs the prototype of Goha, the hero of many Middle Eastern tales describes the lives of the common folk of Cairo before the spread of Western cultural influence’ (Mongrels or Marvels: the Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, ed. Starr & Somekh, 2011). Lydis’s illustrations, evidently reduced from larger drawings are striking ― mostly depicting women of all ages and classes. This is one of 1000 copies on Rives (after 100 on Hollande and 100 on Annam).

First edition with the illustrations by Lydis, one of 350 copies on Rives (total edition 382).

The novel first appeared in 1936. Montherlant is remembered partly through the lens of Simone de Beauvoir, who chastised his misogyny and anti-feminism in The Second Sex. The disdain for adult homosexuality he expressed in public took on disturbing dimensions when viewed in the context of his private paedophilia, fully revealed only after his death. He was, however, an important connection for Mariette Lydis and was one of her first acquaintances on her arrival in Paris; he later wrote several appreciations of her work.

Number 9 of 100 copies of a separately-issued lithograph, coloured by the artist and exhibited at London’s Leicester Gallery in 1935. A reviewer in The Connoisseur wrote of that exhibition:
‘February’s triple bill at the Leicester Galleries began with a display of paintings, drawings and prints by Mariette Lydis, a Viennese, domiciled in Paris. She has been a prolific illustrator. No fewer than thirty volumes with drawings by her have been published, copies of which have been acquired by many of the principal national libraries. Her work may be seen in the public galleries of Paris — the Jeu du Paume and the Luxembourg — of Milan, Amsterdam, Vienna, Leipzig, and elsewhere. She has also been accorded the honour of having a self-portrait received in the Uffizi Gallery. Her travels have taken her all over Europe, to America and to Morocco, and she is said to be entirely self-taught.
In the drawings, which seem to be mainly studies or projects, her attitude, and quite rightly, appears to be objective. Often her subjects are viewed as so much still-life, but they show considerable delicacy, if not variety, in handling. Her paintings evince, especially in such subjects as the dream-like Nuages, more of imagination and more of sensibility. Sainte Vierge Enfant has a pleasant cameo-like quality, and Javanaise, considerable attractiveness. For ourselves, we find her most interesting in her etchings and lithographs. A series of the latter, entitled L’Art d’Aimer and the map like Oracle, are both imaginative and original’.

First edition, a charming children’s book with a Gallo-Roman setting, illustrated throughout by Lydis.

First edition, tirage de tête, copy number 6 of 30 copies on Japon (total edition 1100). A witty appreciation of Joseph Delteil, in the form of an ironic literary hagiography by his friends. Novelist and critic Joseph Delteil was associated primarily with the Surrealists, but he was an early admirer of the work of Mariette Lydis and also her lover for part of 1928. It was Delteil who observed that Lydis ‘paints with her breasts’, a remark which proved to be a controversial subversion of Renoir’s claim to ‘paint with my prick’ (Gluzman, ‘Desire, Mystery, Devotion: On Mariette Lydis’s Trajectory’, ISFLAA NY, ‘From the Desk of...’ 22 November 2024).

First edition, a total edition of 75 numbered copies, with plates signed by the artist, this being one of 60 copies on Hollande. Lucian’s text dates from the second century AD and the translation used here is that of Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt, of the seventeenth century. ‘Although on the periphery of the classical canon, Lucian’s text was popular with European and American audiences in the 1920s and 1930s as work that stimulated discourse on alternative sexualities’ (Paula Birnbaum, Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities, 2011, p. 208, and after, discussing a specific print from this edition which ‘celebrates the sexuality of a lesbian couple on the Greek island of Lesbos... represented by two modern-looking, naked women embracing passionately’).
This copy contains the printed notice that it was reserved for the artists Antoine ‘Tony’ Marie Charles de Lyée de Belleau and Annie de Villeneuve-Esclapon, on the occasion of their marriage. Carteret IV, p. 235: ‘Intéressant publication’. Worldcat: Bibliothèque nationale, Montpellier, Yale, Library of Congress, Boston Public Library only, to which we add the Edinburgh copy.

First edition of this collection with the Lydis illustrations. Number 85 of 165 copies and contains the inscription: ‘A Ida, avec toute mon amitié — en souvenir d’une semaine heureuse passée auprès d’elle. Mariette Lydis Paris 1934’ likely to have been addressed to the Russian-born dancer Ida Rubinstein.

Chant des Amazones is a celebration of female athleticism in verse, prose and image and is dedicated to ‘une jeune fille victorieuse dans la course des 1,000 mètres’. The texts are drawn from Montherlant’s Les Onze devant la porte dorée (1924) which he had written against the background of preparations for the 1924 Paris Olympics. Women’s participation in Olympic athletics was then extremely limited, but the decade after 1924 witnessed its rapid expansion and a general enthusiasm for women’s sport, reflected in this book. Well-known as a writer, Montherlant was an important contact for Lydis throughout her career though his posthumous reputation has revealed him as a serial pederast and dabbler in right-wing politics. His later works were marked by distinct anti-feminism and misogyny. Lydis’ illustrations are fresh and well-meaning, but her evident sexualisation of pubescent girls is troubling to the modern eye. The book was issued in handsome silver, green and turquoise lithographed wrappers.

Rare first edition of the memoirs of the great circus performer Jules Léotard, pioneer of the flying trapeze who inspired the 1867 song ‘The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’. A second edition of his Mémoires appeared in the same year, with the same pagination, but giving ‘deuxième édition’ on the title — almost all library copies appear to be of this later edition. The superb comic lithograph by Durandeau shows Léotard trapezing over the city of Paris, while adoring female fans cry out to him from the rooftops (some flying heart-shaped kites). With Blondin, Léotard was one of the first great celebrities of the circus, when he visited London in 1861, Charles Dickens wrote: ‘I have been beguiled into seeing Léotard, and it is at once the most fearful and most graceful thing I have ever seen.’ (Letter to Macready, June 11, 1861).

First editions of all three of George Auriol’s monogram books, with a rich array of designs for his artistic and literary colleagues in Paris and further afield. Polymathic poet and songwriter, part of the Chat Noir (along with his lifelong friend Erik Satie) Auriol created designs that became emblematic of Art nouveau Paris, together with his typography for the Metropolitain railway and type designs adapted by Peignot. The three volumes of monograms include marks for himself and his closest collaborator, Henri Rivière, as well as Stéphane Mallarmé, Octave Uzanne, the Théâtre du Chat Noir, Edmond Haraucourt, Anatole France, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlen, Octave Mirbeau, Aristide Briand and Woodrow Wilson. Most display the clear influence of the pervading japonisme in contemporary Parisian design, with Auriol adapting the Japanese quasi-heraldic culture of the pictographic Japanese ‘mon’ to western lettering.
Publishers for whom Auriol supplied monograms included Ernest Flammarion, Quillot, Larousse, Hachette, Peignot et fils, Henri Laurens and we also find the earliest logo for Cadbury’s chocolate (1905, in the volume for 1907).
Each volume of the set is of regular trade issue (nonetheless issued in small numbers) and the 1924 volume bears an elegant inscription by Auriol in red ink to the publisher Pierre Monot, at the Larousse Mensuel — one of Auriol’s most important publishing connections. It also contains an autograph letter from Edmond Lauren on notepaper bearing his Auriol-designed notepaper. The 1907 volume contains two prospectuses.

A striking needlework pattern for Berlin-work. ‘Berlin wool work is embroidery with Berlin wools or any type of thread or beads on canvas by means of copying a coloured chart known as a Berlin pattern. Almost exclusively confined to the 19th century, Berlin wool derived its name from the wool that came from Merino sheep in Saxony. It was taken to Gotha to be spun and on to Berlin to be dyed... Prior to the introduction of Berlin patterns it was very rare to find any indication about the choice of colour or threads. Berlin patterns were always coloured by hand at first, until the emergence of industrial printing techniques’ (V&A). Though the patterns (which rarely survive) usually originated in Germany, Berlin work was enthusiastically practised by women all over Europe and in North America.

A pocket guide for visitors to the three levels of the Eiffel Tower.

First edition of this luxurious production, the text translated by Lucie Paul-Marguerite from the Chinese seventeenth-century collection Kin-kou-kikouan (or Jingu qiguan) and telling the moral story of an extra-marital adventure. The 16 original paintings on silk are attributed to Ouang Shao Ki of Szechuan, copied for this edition in Peking by four separate artists (one each for the drawing, the foliage, the clothing and the figures). They are remarkable productions, and each one is captioned in manuscript with Chinese characters. Produced in only 125 copies, this is one of the 10 copies on Japon reserved for the author (copy number 3).
Lucie Paul-Margueritte (1886-1955) began publishing in magazines at the age of eighteen. After three years of marriage, she divorced and thereafter lived with her widowed sister, Ève Paul-Margueritte. Together, they raised the latter's son, living from their writings. She made numerous translations including several from the Chinese and a number of English novels, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Carteret IV. p. 265: ‘Belle publication’. WorldCat: Bn and Boston Athenaeum only.

First edition of these three photographically illustrated albums, mainly portraits of contemporary Parisian actresses, dancers and singers, both from the mainstream theatres and the smaller dance halls and cafés-concerts. Reutlinger’s studio specialised in such portraits, usually actresses photographed in different degrees of deshabille in either studio settings or in the corridors and dressing rooms of the theatre. The voyeurism of the photographer is extended into bedroom and bathroom scenes intended to illustrate the daily routine of the ideal Parisienne. Sarah Bernhardt and Yvette Guilbert appear, while most subjects are now little-known but then much admired Parisian performers.

First edition of one of the most interesting Paris Exposition guides.

A steel-engraved plate collection made after daguerrotypes. Another issue (with variant title contained 28 plates).

First edition of the Art Journal’s retrospective catalogue of the 1867 Exposition, including notice of the prize winners. It is a kaleidoscope of Second Empire decorative and applied arts from all over Europe and beyond. It comprises: a general Introduction by C. Boutell; Glass - Domestic and Decorative by G. Wallis; Lace and Embroidery by Mrs. B. Palliser; Adaptations From the Antique by C. Boutell; Art Materials and Products in Clay, Stone, Marbles, Etc. by D.T. Ansted; Furniture. by J.B. Atkinson; Textile Fabrics by Mrs. B. Palliser; Goldsmith's Work, Silver, and Jewellery by H. Friswell; Porcelain and Pottery by J. Dafforne and Bronzes and Bronze Imitations by G. Wallis.