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First edition, one of 500 copies. A copiously-illustrated homage to the Parisian landmark. An English translation appears at the end, concluding: ‘O Moulin Rouge! Thou dost dominate Paris, France, the world. Thy sails turn forever, for the breeze that moves them is the breath of the men who come to admire thee and to adore thee, Mill of Voluptuousness, Tower of Delight, Ark of Alliance, Vessel of Caresses, Star of the Evening, House of Pleasant Weariness, Palace of Languidness, Mystic Rose also, of which each petal is a moving sail capped by a bonnet, O Carnal Vase held towards all men who approach unto love....’ You get the idea.

First edition: a survey of the city in 1860 (its buildings and infrastructure, ),with long sections on the Asile impérial de Vincennes, founded in 1855 for convalescent workers, the Maison Eugène-Napoléon, a school for poor girls set up in 1858, and the history of Paris’s theatres after Napoleon limited the number of theatres in the city to twelve, then eight.
Vicaire V, 1021.

First edition of a rare erotic novel strongly influenced by Cleland’s Fanny Hill. ‘Alongside the marquis d’Argens’s Thérèse philosophe, Margot la ravaudeuse is one of the crown jewels of what was once the ‘Enfer’ section of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It relates the story of an attractive stocking-darner who manages to climb the social ladder and eventually retires to ‘enjoy with a few intimate friends the best that life has to offer’...’ (Sciuto, Review of Margot la ravaudeuse, by Louis-Charles Fougeret de Monbron. French Studies: A Quarterly Review, vol. 70 no. 4, 2016. The imprint is clearly false as to its date (’1800’) but may be accurate in giving ‘Hambourg’ as the place of publication: the engraved frontispiece is by the Hamburg engraver Christian Fritsch.
Fougeret de Monbron spent time in London, and paraphrased Fanny Hill (1749) which he published in French as La Fille de joye in 1751. Margot la ravadeuse as published here in the first years of the 1750s contains a number of obvious borrowings from Cleland in its explicit narrative, but in fact the author had been at work on a version of the novel before Fanny Hill appeared. He was probably writing it in 1748 when he was denounced to the authorities by a clandestine bookseller and arrested. The manuscript was seized and destroyed and had to be rewritten after his release from prison, by which time Fanny Hill was in print. His introduction to Margot reads (English translation):
‘Here at last is Margot la ravadeuse, a novel which General de la Pousse, encouraged by the corporation of harlots and their infamous henchmen would have us believe constitutes a crime against the State. The author, accused of nothing less than having attempted to undermine the authority of religion, the government and the Sovereign, and fearing that his silence was in itself an admission of guilt, he had no choice but to publish the work, leaving the question of guilt or innocence entirely in the hands of the public’ Dutel, I, A-676 (stating 12mo, incorrectly); Gay III, 34; Pia 466; Darnton, Corpus of Candestine Literature in France, 416. Langille, [Introduction to] Margot la Ravaudeuse, MHRA, 2015.

First edition, inscribed by the author, a symbolist collection, comprising ‘Le Porcher’, ‘Eurythmie’ and a final Envoi.

Francis Vielé-Griffin (pseudonym of Egbert Ludovicus Viélé, 26 May 1864 – 12 November 1937), was a French symbolist poet. He was born at Norfolk, Virginia, USA. ’In 1890 Viélé-Griffin cofounded the review Les Entretiens politiques et littéraires, in which appeared many of his essays calling for the liberation of verse from the strictures of traditional poetic form. He accomplished such liberation in his own poems through his pioneering use of vers libre (free verse). Viélé-Griffin’s work is marked by a fundamental optimism that is grounded in his delight in nature and his belief in the spiritual dimension of human life’ (Britannica).

This is one of the most prized works by this important member of the Belgian avant-garde (1879-1957), published while he was a refugee in London during the Great War

Tijtgat, apprenticed in his father’s lithographic studio, had long been an expert printmaker, but was without a press in London and developed his immediately recognisable style by printing from both woodcuts and linocuts using simply a handroller (his woodcut colophon here shows him at work, pulling a print on a simple table top). The prints of Le Petit Chaperon rouge, painstakingly produced under difficult circumstances, exemplify an invention born of necessity, aptly combined with the apparent naivety of Tijtgat’s art and his artistic interest in the pleasures and fears of childhood. Cyril Beaumont’s support for this refugee artist exemplifies the wider British patronage of exile artists among the tens of thousands of Belgians who fled to Britain between 1914 and 1918, who made a significant impact on British modernism. Besides Le Petit Chaperon rouge, Beaumont published the illustrated poetry collection New Paths with contributions by Tijtgat (1918) as well as the artist’s Carrousels et baraques in 1919. After the war Tijtgat remained for some time in London, before returning to Belgium in the twenties. He is rightly considered an important member of the group later called the ‘Brabant Fauvists’, which had included Tijtgat’s great friend and collaborator, Rik Wouters, who died in 1916 following his internment by the Germans.

The limitation states this is one of 50 copies only: number 23 of 40 copies on papier antique (after 10 copies on chine, signed). This is Tijtgat’s definitive edition (after the very few copies of a large paper trial edition of 1917 and before the Brussels reprint of 1921). The book appears in Tijtgat’s painting of 1922, Ma chambre-atelier, lying on a table, together with the artist’s pipe, a bowl of fruit and a vase of flowers (Milo, Tijtgat, 1930, plate 3). The present copy copy from the collection of Tijtgat’s bibliographer, Pascal Taillaert. Pascal Taillaert, Edgard Tytgat (1999), 38 (noting variations between copies and unbound copies, as well as the 10 additional copies on chine, not listed in the limitation, made for the Ministère des Sciences et des Arts de Belgique). Ridley, Beaumont 10.

A singular illuminated manuscript, an echo of the Celtic Twilight, interpreted in Chicago by an Italian-born American poet of considerable notoriety. ‘The Heart-Cry of the Celtic Maid’ had been first printed in Iris’s poetical collection, Lyrics of a Lad, a slim volume published by Chicago’s Ralph Fletcher Seymour Co. in 1914. But it is here given full calligraphic treatment by the illustrator Gordon Ertz, in a unique volume with five full-page miniatures and the other pages with illuminations, the colophon signed by both poet and illustrator, stating it was ‘especially done for “A Delicate Wine Glass” sometimes known as “Covelli” and at others as “Zada”’.

Though the manuscript is both genuine and attractive it soon exposes Iris’s career of deception, plagiarism, forgery and obfuscation, which stretched over the first six decades of the twentieth century. His poem ‘The Heart-Cry’ was approved of in at least one review of Lyrics of a Lad — one Milo Winter (otherwise apparently unknown) called it ‘graceful’ in the Little Review of December 1914 — but others accused Iris of plagiarism, noting the poem’s similarity to the English poet Laurence Hope’s ‘Love Lightly’ (1902). Plagiarism seems to have been the mildest literary crime practised by Iris, whose trademark strategy was to place fictional reviews of his work by famous authors in his publications. Across his career he published a series of collections often containing endorsements or approvals by association by: Ruskin, Swinburne, Gosse, Francis Thompson, Yeats, Eliot, Sarah Bernhardt, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Robert Frost, G. B Shaw and Edith Sitwell. It is probable that none of these figures had ever heard of Sharmel Iris, who remained a persistent if marginal figure in Chicago literary society until his death in 1967. The whole saga has been recounted by Craig Abbot in ‘The Case of Scharmel Iris’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 77, no. 1, 1983, pp. 15–34 and more recently in his monograph Forging Fame: The Strange Career of Scharmel Iris (2007).

‘If poets are “liars by profession,” Sharmel Iris was truly professional. Poet, plagiarist, imposter, and forger, Iris engaged in a lifelong campaign of self-promotion that linked him to a constellation of leading writers and public figures, among them T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Joyce Kilmer, Ezra Pound, Dame Edith Sitwell, Diego Rivera, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, William Wrigley, and Woodrow Wilson. “Of poets writing today, there is no greater,” states a preface, signed by W. B. Yeats, to one of Iris’s volumes of poetry―although at the time of publication Yeats had been dead for several years’ (Abbot).

The illuminator Gordon Ertz (b. 1891), while not widely known, was sought after as a magazine illustrator and designer of book covers and jackets.

First edition of an early collection of poetry by Fletcher (1863–1935), perhaps better known for his detective fiction.  This copy inscribed by the English poet Olive Custance to the American writer and salonnière Natalie Clifford Barney —‘To Natalie … The Poet and Lover … from the “Little Princess”’— on the front flyleaf.   
‘An avid reader of Pre-Raphaelite and aesthetic literature’, in the 1890s, Custance (1874–1944) ‘developed somewhat flirtatious relationships with John Lane, Henry Harland, and Richard Le Gallienne—respectively the publisher, editor, and reader of The Yellow Book.  Custance was one of the most prolific women poets published in this notorious journal, with poems appearing in eight of its thirteen volumes …
‘Custance’s first poetry volume, Opals, was published in 1897 by The Bodley Head [the same year as Fletcher’s] …  The poems addressed to John Gray were also included in this volume, along with several other love poems directed at ambiguously gendered beloveds.  Such sexual ambiguity was reflected in Custance’s love life during this period.  In the winter of 1900 she received an admiring letter from Natalie Barney, the openly lesbian author and salon hostess.  Custance was invited by Barney to Paris, where she also befriended the symbolist poet Renée Vivien (Barney’s former lover).  Accounts of this ménage are contradictory.  Barney’s autobiography stated that Vivien was jealous of Custance; however, Vivien’s letters and her roman-à-clef A Woman Appeared to Me (1904)—in which Custance appeared as Dagmar—suggest that she and Custance enjoyed a brief love affair during the winter of 1901 
‘During this period, in June 1901, Custance wrote a letter of admiration to Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945).  The poets began to correspond, using the personas of “Fairy Prince” for Douglas, and “Princess” and “Page” for Custance’ (Oxford DNB), which may account for the inscription here.
 

First edition, inscribed by the author’s father to Edmund Gosse of this posthumous novel by Toru Dutt (1856-1877), Indian poet, translator, and novelist. Dutt was born in Calcutta and received her early education there, both in Indian and European languages, under the encouragement of her mother and father (the latter a colonial administrator). ‘In 1869, when she was aged thirteen, and at a time when conservative Hindus believed that crossing the ‘black waters’ was blasphemous, the Dutt family travelled by sea to Europe. Toru and her elder sister Aru were the first Bengali girls to dare such a transgression’ (Chandani Lokugé in ODNB). Toru studied French in Nice and Paris, and English in London and Cambridge. On returning to India she continued her reading of French and British Romantics such as Hugo, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley as well as the Brontës and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She also began an intensive course of study in Sanskrit, while at the same time adapting her new knowledge to retell legends from the Mahabharata in English, using traditional English poetic forms. She died of consumption in 1877 at the age of just twenty-one, by which time she had written four books, of which only one, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (1876), was published in her lifetime.

The novel Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers, was set in Brittany, France, and was published only posthumously. ‘The manuscript, hand-copied by Govin Chunder, was sent to Clarisse Bader, who contributed a foreword, and with whose assistance it was published by Didier in Paris in 1879 and included in the Librarie Académique’. It was an ‘exciting hybrid between the nineteenth-century European gothic romance and the realist genres, and can be read as the creative experiment by a talented novice writer inspired by her reading of European literature’ (Lokugé).

For Western readers, as both a young woman and as an Indian writing in English, a great deal of the interest in Toru Dutt’s poetry was due to her familiarity with English and French literature. Edmund Gosse was an enthusiastic patron and wrote: ‘it would seem that the marvellous facilities of Toru’s mind still slumbered, when, in her thirteenth year, her father decided to take his daughters to Europe to learn English and French. To the end of her days Toru was a better French than English scholar. She loved France best, she knew its literature best, she wrote its language with more perfect elegance.’ (Ancient Ballads, xii). Worldcat lists copies at BL and University of Manitoba only outside continental Europe.

A superb version, with original illustrations, of the parable of the Return of the Prodigal Son, from the Gospel of St Luke. Number 6 of just 25 copies, each with 16 original signed gouaches by Berque, this being copy number VI.

Jean Berque (Reims, 1896 – Paris, 1954), painter and illustrator, was son of a Champagne wine producer. A student of the Nabis, Félix Vallotton, Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier, he was one of the first members of the Union Rémoise des Arts Décoratifs and created the Stations of the Cross for the Saint-Nicaise church in Reims. Renowned for his nudes, he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne from 1924 to 1928 and at the Salon des Tuileries between 1927 and 1934. He is best known as a book illustrator and collaborated with François-Louis Schmied (whose inspiration is clear in this work), Philippe Gonin and the Gonin brothers, from Lausanne. He illustrated works by André Gide, Pierre Louys, Colette, Montherlant, André Maurois, Paul Claudel, Anna de Noailles and Paul-Jean Toulet, as well as The Song of Songs.

First edition of this very attractive diminutive almanac (’The Little Harverster’) for the theatre. It contains 12 plates finely printed in tints, all (except the title) portraits of male and female actors in plays then on the Paris stage. They include Mr. Le Peintre as Pothin in Le Voisin, Mr. Vernet in female dress as Isidor in Les Alsaciennes, Mr Gontier as Charvigny in Scribe and Delavigne’s Le Diplomate and Mme Carmouche (Jenny Verpré) as the eponymous La Reine de seize ans. The text includes excerpts and songs from each of the plays described.

A superb rendition of the temptations familiar to bibliophiles. A collector, seated on the library steps of a well-stocked Parisian book shop is assailed on all sides by monsters and mythical birds and animals offering books in irresistible bindings. This is a characteristic biblio-fantasy by Robida, best known for his futuristic graphic science fictions, such as Le Vingtième Siècle (1883), La Guerre au vingtième siècle (1887) and Le Vingtième siècle. La vie électrique (1890)

Dorbon-Ainé, founded by Louis Dorbon in 1900 was a major Parisian bookshop and publisher, trading in the early twentieth century from the prominent Left Bank location at 53 quai des Grands Augustins. As booksellers, Dorbon specialised in esoteric and occult literature but also published the works of authors such as Xavier Marcel Boulestin, Maurice Des Ombiaux, Claude Farrère, Camille Saint-Saëns, and René Boylesve as well as Jules Lemaître, Claude Debussy, Francis de Miomandre, and the comtesse de Noailles.

First edition of a confessional novel by Lemonnier (1845–1913), the Belgian writer and art critic who ‘shared the aims of the French symbolists and stimulated a revival of Belgian letters’ (Oxford Companion to French Literature), in which the female narrator writes against a male-dominated society which leaves no room for the possibility of female emancipation such that she is driven to dress as a man. 
This copy belonged to the ‘high priest of fin-de-siècle bibliophilia’ (Silverman, The New Bibliopolis, p. 14), Octave Uzanne (1851–1931).  One of only ten numbered copies printed on vergé de Hollande, it includes a unique printed presentation leaf, ‘Cet exemplaire a été imprimé spécialement pour M. Octave Uzanne’, tipped in as pp. 1–2 and inscribed ‘En fidèle souvenir mon cher Uzanne, le double homage de l’éditeur et de l’auteur.  Camille Lemonnier’. 
‘There is no more original Belgian artist than Camille Lemonnier.  A powerful and fertile writer, he represents Belgian literary activity for more than forty years, until his death in 1913, and even if he reflect the various tendencies of the French mind, and adapt himself to his surroundings, he is Flemish to the backbone in his mystico-sensual leanings, in his pious materialism, … in his Rubens-like fertility and love of colour, dash and force.  It is true that he reminds the reader of Zola, and even of Dickens; but it is above all of Rubens and Jordaens that he makes us think, because, like them, he paints his imagination in the form of ever sensitive emotions’ (Gladys Turquet-Milnes, Some modern Belgian Writers, 1916, p. 87).

First edition, first issue, complete with all subsequently censored text, including the final scene in which the heroine makes love to a partially animated transgender mannequin. Rachilde, who was to style herself as a ‘man of letters’ on her calling cards was just 24 when Monsieur Vénus, her second novel was published in Brussels. The book caused an immediate scandal and was vigorously suppressed by the Belgian and French authorities. Subsequent editions were shorn of the novel’s more shocking passages, which were conveniently attributed to Rachilde’s (probably-fictitiou)s co-author ‘Francis Talman’, whose name appeared on the title page. Some critics refused to believe that a work which frankly recounted the pursuit of sexual pleasure by a noblewoman, Raoule de Vénérande, could possibly be the work of a young woman. It remains an unsettling work, describing Raoule’s treatment of her young male lover, Silvert, who she persistently feminizes and humiliates. Silvert ultimately dies at the hands of one of Raoule’s suitor’s in a duel, and is replaced by her with a mannequin (with real hair, teeth and fingernails) who can be alternately dressed in male and female clothes.

The Belgian authorities sought to destroy as many copies of the first edition as possible, and it is accordingly a noted rarity. We can locate the following copies: BnF, Bibliothèque Jaques Doucet, Institut de France in France and Library of Congress, University of Houston, Vanderbilt University in North America, British Library and Cambridge in the UK and Kb in the Netherlands.

A rare French edition of Surr’s Splendid Misery (1801), perhaps the first in French. It is one of two French translations of 1807, the other entitled Splendeur et souffrance published by Maradan. It is not clear which was the first. Though little remembered, Surr’s several novels of fashionable British society were bestsellers in England and were much read in both France and Germany. He was born in London in c. 1770 and was educated at Christ’s Hospital before becoming a clerk at the Bank of England. Garside, Raven and Schöwerling, The English Novel 1770-1829, 1801, 64 (noting the Splendeur et souffrance edition only. Worldcat lists copies of Latimore at Bn and University of Illinois only; COPAC adds no British copies. For Splendeur et souffrance OCLC lists copies at Bn and Universities of Erfurt and Göttingen only; COPAC adds no British copies.

First collected edition of the first series of Tales of Fashionable Life, Edgeworth’s most ambitious literary project. containing Ennui, Almeria, Madame de Fleury, The Dun, Manoeuvring. In his preface, Richard Lovell Edgeworth notes his daughter's aim ‘to promote, by all her writings, the progress of education, from the cradle to the grave’, and that the present and envisaged volumes of the series were ‘intended to point out some of those errors, to which the higher classes of society are disposed’. A second series appeared in 1812, for which she received £1050 making her the most commercially successful novelist of her age.

One of 375 numbered sets (number 266). The type of the Shakespeare Head Chaucer is Caslon Old Face and the illustrations of the Canterbury pilgrims are adapted from the Ellesmere manuscript. ‘The first impression is of care in planning, of thought for the reader. A friendly craftsmanship comes from all the pen and brush work in these books. The illustrations enter as a pleasant surprise, rather than necessary parts of the plan. The edition seems complete without them, but we are delighted to find them’ (Franklin, The Private Presses, pp. 149-50). The set comprises The Canterbury Tales (in the first four volumes), Consolation of Philosophy, Troilus and Criseyde, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, later minor poems, doubtful poems, A Treatise on the Astrolabe and The Romaunt of the Rose.

Copy number 50 of 750 copies of the limited edition, signed by the illustrator. Edward Detmold was the longest surviving of the two tragic Detmold twins who had attracted the attention of artists such as Edward Burne-Jones as children and young artists. Edward’s brother Maurice had committed suicide in 1908, after producing numerous highly regarded prints at the turn of the century. Edward himself continued to make prints and publish illustrated books until his own suicide in 1957. Animals and birds were their primary subjects and to varying degrees, their prints exhibit the clear influence of the Japanese master printmakers.

Number 381 of 485 copies on paper (there were also 15 on vellum). Along with Troilus and Criseyde and The Four Gospels, The Canterbury Tales is one of the high points of the Golden Cockerel Press. It perhaps stands above above all in Gill’s masterful designs, forming, as Colin Franklin pointed out an integral part of the book’s success — ‘not quite illustration but far transcending decoration’. ‘The balance of text and illustration goes further than typography... Most of the borders are leaf and stem, but among the leaves, hiding or beckoning, climbing or leaning out, are girls and men, kings and boys, priests and nuns who take part or seem to be commenting on the stories. A young man is whistling across the page, two fingers at his mouth, to a girl; Chaucer himself waves to a little god of love facing across his own poem; a sad lover looks over to Christ crucifies; Pan blows pipes and a naked girl, hearing him, prepares to climb her tree; a nineteen-twentyish girl climbs up, and a sad young bearded man looking like Robert Gibbings sits, supporting the whole tree’s weight, opposite; Chaucer is writing with confidence under the leaves, taking it down by dictation from the naughty spirit looking down and over the lines. So the pattern continues, affectionate and cheeky, erotic, enjoyable and relevant, decorative and explanatory, a balance of taste and eye’ (Franklin). Franklin, The Private Presses, 137-144.

Troilus and Criseyde is the first of the three outstanding Golden Golden Cockerel Press editions produced by Robert Gibbings and Eric Gill (the others being The Canterbury Tales and the The Four Gospels). This copy is number 183 of 225 copies. The Middle English text was edited by Arundell del Re, the compositors were F. Young and A.H. Gibbs and the pressman, A.C Cooper.

Gill’s woodcuts include portraits of Chaucer: one depicting him with Cupid whispering in his ear, the other shows him writing Troilus. There are four full-page illustrations, one at the beginning of each book, while every page has a tall border facing each other across each opening. In these Gill successfully re-imagined the borders of medieval manuscripts in which the images do more than simply decorate the margins, but work in interplay with the text — marking, illustrating and commenting with varying degrees of transparency, subtlety, eroticism and humour. ‘They rank very high in the range of Gill’s work’ (Franklin, p. 142).

Provenance: Sotheby’s, 10^th July 2001, lot 369.
Franklin, The Private Presses, 137-144.

First Barbier edition, copy number 7 of 100, of this sumptuously illustrated version of the story of the Queen of Sheba, combining illustrations by Barbier and the Abyssinian artist Michel Engueda-Work all printed as gravures by Manzi, Joyant and Cie. French scholar, traveller and diplomat, Hughes Le Roux had transcribed parts of the Ethiopian chronicle Kebra Nagast in 1904, with the help of local scholars, from a manuscript looted by the British at Maqdala and subsequently returned. The Kebra Nagast or ‘The Glory of the Kings,’ is a fourteenth-century national epic of Ethiopia, written in Geʽez by the nebure id Ishaq of Aksum. In its existing form, the text is at least 700 years old and purports to trace the origins of the Solomonic dynasty, a line of Ethiopian Orthodox Christian monarchs who ruled the country (until 1974), to the biblical king, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

The story of the text’s survival is interesting. The Battle of Maqdala, the last struggle in the British Expedition to Abyssinia, led to significant looting by the victorious British forces, who took Emperor Tewodros II’s crown along with ceremonial crosses, chalices, weapons and the holy icon Kwer’ata Re’esu along with two fine manuscripts of the Kebra Nagast which found their way to the British Museum (catalogued as Oriental MS 818 and 819 respectively). 819 was returned to Ethiopia in 1872 on the request of the Abyssinian king, who identified it as a fundamental source of law. Hugues Le Roux, a French envoy from the President of the French Republic to Menyelek II, King of Ethiopia, later went to Addis Alem in order to see this manuscript and to obtain his permission to transcribe it. He notes in his introduction here the inscription ‘This volume was returned to the King of Ethiopia by order of the Trustees of the British Museum, Dec. 14th, 1872’. Of the artist Michel Engueda-Work who is referred to elsewhere as an ‘Abyssinian artist’, almost nothing else is known, but his illustrations are of course far truer to the Ethiopian style than Barbier’s highly exoticised and eroticised interpretations, in which Sheba is portrayed (following long tradition) as a white woman. The text had appeared in English in an edition of 1907 (New York and London, Funk and Wagnalls) together with versions of Engueda-Work’s illustrations.