erotica

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 a rare pamphlet issued in the wake of the decree issued by the police prefect Claude Mangin on April 14, 1830, prohibiting prostitutes ‘from appearing, at any time and under any pretext, in the passages, in public gardens and on the boulevards’ and ordering them to engage in prostitution only in licensed brothels. This measure lasted only three months, but was enough for its opponents to publish dozens of pamphlets. All these occasional pieces are extremely rare, including this one.

Purporting to be the work of a Matrone, jurisconsulte de ces dames this enquiry and petition is satirical in tone, and yet still gives voice to the women it represents, by outlining in detail how Mangin’s heavy-handed decree would effect them at various levels, pointing out the impossibility of enclosing the thousands of Parisian filles de joie in licenses houses. The frontispiece, which has been attributed to Henri Monnier, shows a discussion among the women debating the pour et contre of the measures, presided over by the matron. It is captioned ‘Comité central et de Sabbat des Donzelles de Paris’, likening it to a ‘sabbath’ of witches. WorldCat lists copies at the Bn, Cleveland Public Library and Bryn Mawr College only.

Illustrations of the ‘Pièces condamnées’ from Fleurs du mal. One of 30 copies, number 6 of 20 numbered copies (after 5 copies ‘avec suites’, and before 5 hors commerce copies). An exceptionally rare and provocative companion to the Fleurs du mal collection issued in the same year, by a highly idiosyncratic female artist about comparatively little is known. It contains the six poems banned in 1857: ‘Lesbos’, ‘Femmes damnés’, ‘Le Léthé’, ‘À celle qui est trop gaie’, ‘Les Bijoux’ and ‘Les Métamorphoses du Vampire’. The texts are incorporated into the etched plates with particularly explicit illustration. The plates are deeply etched with areas of velvety blackness, heightened by hand with subtle colouring and painted gold.

Active between 1907 and 1935, Jouvet-Magron worked mainly in Paris, becoming a member of the Salon des Artistes Français in 1908. Though productive and much respected in the early years of the twentieth-century The artist’s identity was sufficiently obscure for two reviewers in The Print Connoisseur in 1923 to assume ‘Dominique’ referred to a male artist: the first, Clement-Janin, noted the ‘exceptionally modern temperament’ behind Jouvet-Magron’s etchings of ‘those temples of labour—the factories’. He also noted ‘Dominque Jouvet-Magron is not a pupil of the Ecole des Beaux Arts and has had no teacher’, while a G. Desdevises du Dezert, Dean of the Faculty of Letters of Clermont-Ferrand, adds that ‘the poetry of industrial life has not escaped him [sic]’. he Print Connoisseur lists 42 plates and suites, of French churches, factories, industrial machinery, portraits of Henri Magron (the artist’s father -in-law), opium smokers, danses macabres and a messe noire — all surely indicating a perfect future artist for Fleurs du Mal.

Jouvet-Magron’s IX Poèmes des Fleurs du mal and Pièces condamnées (both 1931) were exhibited at the Salon international du Livre d'art at the Petit Palais, May-August 1931 where complaints were received and the books removed from the show. While illustrations of Baudelaire often pushed boundaries, it’s easy to see why Jouvet-Magron’s might have shocked, especially those for Pièces condamnées which are particularly explicit. The matter was reported both in France and abroad, revealing that it was used as a test case for the continued official suppression of six poems of Fleurs du mal, still in force since they were first banned in 1857. The so called Pièces condamnées (‘Lesbos’, ‘Femmes damnés’, ‘Le Léthé’, ‘À celle qui est trop gaie’, ‘Les Bijoux’ and ‘Les Métamorphoses du Vampire’), were widely printed, despite their legal status, and publishers and critics in the thirties seemed to have used Jouvet-Magron’s collection, which reproduced the text alongside her images, as a means to bring the legal anomaly to public attention. In the event the publication of Fleurs du mal was not decriminalised until 1949. The Print Connoisseur, 3, p. 91. Worldcat lists the Bibliothèque nationale copy only.

First edition, rare, of this collection of racy tales from the Palais Royal, the fabled European capital of libertinism. Framed as a series of initiatory narratives on the perils of loose women and gambling, Les Soirées contains several anecdotes of sociological interest. One involves a bragging libertine husband, who claims his wife would never cuckold him, only for the narrator to seduce her and to contrive a fitting punishment for his boasts. He arranges adjoining private rooms in a favourite Palais Royale restaurant, sending the husband to one with a complicit mistress, while he himself takes the libertine’s wife to another. As the couples make love, an opening between the two rooms allows them to see just enough of their neighbours to further inflame their desire. Only on leaving the chamber does the husband realise that it was his wife he has seen in flagrante in the other room, and with his friend. After an understandable outburst, a philosophical discussion ensues on the equivalence of female and male desire and morality (see Counter, The Amorous Restoration: Love, Sex, and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France, 2016, p. 137).

The two plates were evidently printed on the same sheet, appearing as a folding frontispiece in some copies.

Anonymous, the book is attributed to Cuisin, who specialised in Palais Royale titillation and produced many similar works. The printer, the widow Jeunehomme is an interesting figure, one of a handful of female printers in Paris at this point and a Bonapartist who was later imprisoned for political reasons (Dictionnaire des femmes libraires en France, 1470-1870). Worldcat locates copies at Bn (without half-title), BL (with half-title) and Johns Hopkins (also 1815, but ‘Second edition’, perhaps an error, confounding this work with an earlier work with a similar title)

First edition in book form, printed for private circulation and exceptionally rare. This copy bound in contemporary blue morocco with a rare additional engraved autoportrait by the author (a plate known in a handful of copies and in no other copy of Point de Lendemain).
Point de Lendemain is one of the great erotic classics of French literature. One summer night, a married woman initiates an encounter with a young ingénu ― and so begins a sophisticated and nuanced story of mutual seduction. ‘In merely thirty or so pages, the erotic conte [tale] Point de lendemain … captures the libertine essence of the French eighteenth century. It is often read, with a fondness not far from nostalgia, as a vignette for a certain idea of libertinage. With Point de lendemain, Denon celebrates the subtle seductions and the intense voluptés of vicomtes and marquises, set in rococo landscapes à la Watteau or in lavish interiors worthy of Du Barry. Point de lendemain is as graceful as a painting by Fragonard …’ (Marine Ganofsky).
This 1812 text has been reprinted many times, usually with plates making explicit what is so subtly left implicit in the original. In its first incarnation the tale appeared in an issue of the Mélanges littéraires ou Journal des dames in 1777 — its authorship concealed under the initials ‘M.D.G.O.D.R.’ — but Denon later revised and republished anonymously in this definitive edition of 1812, the version in which it is known today. It was printed in very small numbers (perhaps just 25 copies) and privately distributed. Copies are highly prized, both in private and public collections and we find just 4 copies in public collections worldwide: the Bibliothèque nationale copy only is listed in the Catalogue collectif de France, while OCLC/Worldcat lists American copies at Yale and the University of California, Berkeley only. There is also a copy in the Bodleian Library. L’Enfer de la Bibliotheque 57; Brunet II, 599; Diesbach-Soultrait 40; Monglond IX, 1167 (the two copies listed, including that of the Reserve, do not contain a plate). Marine Ganofsky, Point de Lendemain (Literary Encyclopedia, University of Saint Andrews, online).

A series of witty and finely executed erotic miniatures, presumably a Paris souvenir made with an anglophone audience in mind, most likely the American servicemen in Paris after 1945.

A rare satirical elegy and epitaph for the celebrated electrical eel, who could no longer rise to the occasion. 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). ESTC: Harvard and Princeton only worldwide of this issue. ESTC gives the pagination [4], 29, [1], but both the 2 copies reported have only pp [2] before title, as here, though it is perhaps likely the work was issued with a half-title or initial blank not present in surviving copies.

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. 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. Boroughs, R., ‘Oscar Wilde’s Translation of Petronius: The Story of a Literary Hoax,’ English Literature in Transition: 1880—1920 38, p. 9-49. Bn Catalogue: ‘Dans un de ses catalogues de vente, n° 5, Charles Carrington, l'éditeur, propose sous le n° 1403 un ouvrage qui semble identique, en attribuant dans le corps de la notice le travail à un "Oxford M.A.", avec en note : "Traduction attribuée à l'esthète célèbre le feu Oscar Wilde". On notera cependant que, dans la correspondance publiée, les deux seules allusions faites au "Satyricon" sont relatives au dossier de presse de "Dorian Gray", ouvrage dont Carrington avait acquis le copyright. De même il ne semble pas que les éléments d'apparat critique, "Introduction, Synopsis of the plot, List of books used", permettent de remonter jusqu'à un article d'Oscar Wilde sur ce sujet. Par contre Mason, "Bibliography"... n° 336, signale un encart de l'édition, publiée en 1909 par Charles Carrington, de "Picture of Dorian Gray"... indiquant qu'il n'attribuait plus ni la traduction de Pétrone ni celle de Barbey d'Aurevilly, à Wilde.

A very rare spurious edition of these erotic and bawdy poems by Burns and his circle, first published in 1799 (of which edition only 2 copies are known to survive). The title-page is headed ‘Not for maids, ministers or striplings’. The Roy collection of Robert Burns contains several similar reprints to ours (including our issue) each with differing title-pages giving ‘1827’.

‘Shepherds I have got the clap,
Stroking of my Anna;
My time’s filled up, oh sad mishap,
With taking salts and senna.
I for her King’s Place forsook,
Where girls I had past telling;
But now my pipe’s turned to a crook,
My b—, how they’re hanging...’ Roy collection of Robert Burns, p. 141 b.

First edition in English, very scarce, a portion of Sinistrari’s De Delictis et Poenis Tractatus Absolutissimus (1700). The English title here finds an echo the following year with ’The love that dare not speak its name’ in Lord Alfred Douglas’s poem ‘Two Loves’ (1894), later discussed at length in the Wilde trial. 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.

Ludovico Maria Sinistrari (26 February 1622 – 1701) was an Italian Franciscan priest, author, and member of the Inquisition tasked with the investigation of sexuality. Worldcat: Cornell, NYPL, UC Davis, Trinity College Oxford, Bibliothèque nationale.

First edition of this extraordinary treatise on the status of eunuchs in society, according to civil and canon law. 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. Gay III, 1239.

First edition, privately printed. 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).

A scarce early edition. 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. ESTC gives 7 locations: BL (2 copies), John Rylands, Manchester (2 copies). McMaster University and Universities of Illinois and Waterloo.