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Number 40 of 100 copies signed by Woolf, reserved for sale in Great Britain, from a total edition of 450.

‘Virginia Woolf entered the political arena with A Room of Ones Own (1929). It originated as two papers read to women undergraduates in the Arts Society at Newnham College and the ODTAA Society at Girton College, Cambridge, in October 1928. The aim was to establish a woman’s tradition, recognizable through its distinct problems: the age-old confinement of women to the domestic sphere, the pressures of conformity to patriarchal ideas, and worst, the denial of income and privacy (’a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write’). A brief history of women’s writing tries to prove that their works were deformed by inward strife—not convincingly when we are pressed to agree that Jane Eyre is flawed by its author’s protest against the limitations imposed upon women. On the other hand, Virginia Woolf is brilliantly persuasive when she ridicules the power bias of male history narrowing in on war and kings with golden teapots on their heads. A counter-history waits in the wings: the untried potentialities of women, nurtured but unspoilt in women’s colleges, who are not to be imitation men but are to think back ‘through their mothers’. Virginia Woolf wants to retrieve rather than discard the traditions of womanhood, a position forecast in 1906 at the outset of her career with a historical story, ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’, set during the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses. It suggests that women excluded from historical record were the true makers of England as they passed their unnoticed code of preservation from mother to daughter, cultivating domestic order and the arts of peace, as opposed to militarized thugs who repeatedly destroyed it.’ (Lyndall Gordon, Oxford DNB). Kirkpatrick A12a.

First edition. A preface explains the etymology of the novel’s subtitle: Cigisbéisme [’cicisbeism’] — the custom, probably of Italian origin, of a married woman keeping an additional male companion, either Platonic or otherwise. Its author, Durdent, produced several other novels and a translation of Edgeworth’s Fanny. Despite its promising subject matter, Clémentina appears to have gone almost entirely unnoticed by contemporary reviewers.

This copy is complete with spine labels (two for each volume) printed on the verso of the title-page of the second volume. Thankfully, they have not been used in binding here (which has black labels lettered in gilt supplied by the binder) since their use would entail sacrificing the title page. It seems an odd place to print them, and where such printed title-pages have been encountered elsewhere they have been printed on a blank. Worldcat: Cambridge (England) and Toronto only.

First edition. A novel illustrating the contemporary vogue for fiction based on the records of the French law courts. A contemporary reviewer in the Revue encyclopèdique savaged the novel itself but evidently found the 38-page introduction interesting - being a commentary on the merits of the relatively recent development of trial by jury in France. The book found several other reviews in the same year and evidently divided opinion. The Revue bibliographique du Royaume des Pays-bas simply noted ‘Cet ouvrage a été saisi par la police’.

Dubergier, who did not put his name on the title, was prolific both as a translator from English and as a novelist in his own right — usually favouring popular literature of the Walter Scott variety, sometime with Scottish or Irish settings. Querard, 11, p. 115. Worldcat lists the Bn and Princeton copies only.

Copy number one, with twelve original watercolour drawings by George Barbier (including those for the wrappers), a grand papier copy printed on vieux japon, and a double suite of illustrations (on chine and japon, one in colour one in outline). This is the first of the three special tirage de tête copies, each containing one third of the thirty-six original Barbier watercolours, this the primary copy, with cover designs. The total edition was of 1091 copies on various papers.

This is one of Barbier’s last illustrative works – he died in 1932 at the age of 50 and at the height of his celebrity, already recognised as one of the greatest French illustrators of his century and subsequently regarded as a father of the Art Deco movement. Gautier’s orientalist novel provided the perfect inspiration for Barbier’s ambiguously eroticised designs, including one of the most immediately recognisable wrapper designs of the era. His finely-wrought watercolours were reduced in reproduction (though not the signed original of the cover) and they retain pencil notes and guidelines for preparing Eugène Gasperini’s woodblocks.

Barbier’s many jewel-like designs for fashion and the ballet and his book illustrations have long been collectible, of course, and he has more recently been the object of a gradual reclamation as a gay artist (despite an absence of any concrete evidence of his sexuality). It is notable he left so little by way of biographical record, and that he was to some extent overlooked or forgotten in the years following his untimely death, leading some commentators to infer a concealed sexuality. ‘Contributing to his disappearance were his own reticence and a surprising sparseness of biographical information. Born into a prosperous bourgeois family in the provincial town of Nantes, he lived a clearly very different lifestyle in Paris, where he frequented unmistakably, if not exclusively, homosexual circles - he was, for example, an intimate of the dandy and poet Robert de Montesquiou, who introduced him to Marcel Proust’, Roderick Conway Morris, ‘Forgotten Art of French illustrator George Barbier’, The New York Times, Nov. 14 2008.

Gautier’s Roman de la Momie was first published in 1857 and is a quintessential Orientalist fantasy, striking in recounting the discovery of a fully preserved female pharaoh in the Valley of the Kings by an English and a German Egypotologist. The mummy is identified as a queen, Tahoser, and a combination of hieroglyphics in the chamber and a papyrus scroll reveals her story.

The superb binding is by Cretté (1893-1969), ‘one of the Ecole Estienne’s most brilliant pupils... [who] after graduating joined Marius Michel’s studio, eventually taking over a month before the master’s death in 1925’ (Duncan and de Bartha, Art Nouveau and Art Deco Bookbinding. The French Masterpieces 1880-1940, 1989).

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).

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 88 of 100 on pur fil Lafuma with plates in 2 states, after copies on Japon and Hollande, of a total edition of 1585 copies on different papers. 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.

First edition of this British political satire, co-opting Aesop’s animals of in a series of witty verses, capitalising on the popularity of the Aesop in English via the editions of Ogilby and L’Estrange. ‘In 1698 a whole series of fables began to appear anonymously which set Aesop on a journey through England and the rest of Europe. He comments through his animal characters about the Jacobite threat, William’s government of England, and Louis XIV’s ambitions on the continent. As one writer put it, “It is now the Mode, it seems, for Brutes to turn Politicians,” and Aesop was chosen as their main expositor. Aesop at Tunbridge (1698) was a structured attack on William and on Whig principles in general. In the same year Aesop at Bath criticized the Jacobites; Aesop Return d from Tunbridge committed the hapless supporter of the Jacobites to Bedlam; Old Aesop at Whitehall defended the government; and Aesop at Amsterdam objected to the very monarchical forms of government supported in one way or another by Whig, Tory, and Jacobite factions’ (Daniel, ‘Political and Philosophical Uses of Fables in eighteenth-century England’, The Eighteenth Century, 23, 2, 1982, p. 153).
Wing O196. ESTC lists US copies at Clark (UCLA), Folger, Harvard, Cincinnati and Texas.

First edition, presentation copy. A witty imaginary Voyage autor de ma chambre in the spirit of Le Maistre. In just nine steps the author circumnavigates his room, bumping into Napoleon and traversing Europe. There are verses, riddles, enigmas and an acrostic on the Swedish succession: ‘Charles Jean Prince Royal de Suede’. The ninth step is a long verse dedicated to the elderly British King George III. The allegorical plate depicts voyagers in an elegant state of undress on the back of a flying horse. The dedicatee of this presentation copy is Maria Juliana Wahrendorff von Rosen (1763-1820). Worldcat locates the Yale copy only in the US. JISC/Copac lists no UK copies.

First edition of this very scarce novel by a significant British Catholic author. She was born Gertrude Hext in Cornwall in 1812 and became a Catholic in 1844. A review of Edith Mortimer in The Rambler enthused: ‘Mrs. Parsons is one of our best writers of Catholic fiction. There is a heartiness and energy about almost every thing that comes from her pen...’

‘A deeply religious woman, Gertrude Parsons was charitable to the poor and a leading benefactor of the mission at Little Malvern. Gertrude Parsons’s enthusiastic commitment to her adopted faith was most apparent, however, in many of her published works. Thornberry Abbey (1846), in which the heroine and her clergyman fiancé are both converted to Catholicism, is clearly semi-autobiographical. In another early novel, Edith Mortimer, or, The Trials of Life (1857), a young Roman Catholic convert learns to conquer her pride, breaking off her engagement to a rich protestant cousin. In the 1860s Gertrude Parsons wrote four tract tales for Burns and Oates’s Tales and Narrative series, which was aimed at a working-class audience; these included Lent Lilies and The Muffin Girl’ (Rosemary Mitchell in Oxford DNB). WorldCat lists US copies at Brigham Young and Huntington only.

First edition with this title and introductory part, a very rare opportunistic edition of Lettres Portuguaises, which found itself onto the Index librorum prohibitorum in 1727. The epistolary novel Lettres Portugaises was one of the publishing sensations of the late seventeenth century and beyond, first published in Paris in 1669, purporting to be the genuine letters between a Portugese nun, Mariana Alcoforado, and the French nobleman, the Marquis de Chamilly. Despite its passionate tone it was not outlawed and indeed it was widely reprinted and set the tone for much of the sentimental and epistolary fiction of the eighteenth century. Though the letters have been proved to be fictional, both parties were real.

This edition, probably clandestine, seems to have been a step too far in the eyes of the censors. Apparently a reissue of the sheets of a 1696 Lyon edition, it was augmented with a 48-page prequel in which the first encounters between Maria and the Marquis in Portugal are recounted. This text was cast as a seduction scene, in which the young nun entertained the Marquis in a private apartment beside her cloister, dressed in a pale blue nightgown adorned with red ribbons. Suppression seems to have been effective and it is unrecorded in public collections, as far as we can tell, besides a single copy in the library at Bourg-en-Bresse. Gay mentions it among the reprints of Lettres Portugaises, citing a copy offered for sale in Paris in 1869. Gay II, 847. Not found in Worldcat.

First edition, preserved in original wrappers, of this popular and critically-acclaimed roman de moeurs. It was widely-read around Europe and, interestingly, appeared on the advert leaves of numerous English books (in its original French). The Quarterly Review commented: ‘M. Picard is well known to be the most celebrated dramatic writer in France. The French Critics have pronounced this to be one of the best novels that has appeared since Gil Blas’ (1815). Picard was variously a playwright, actor, novelist, poet and musical director in Paris.

The earliest portrait of Leopold Bloom? Mariette Lydis contributed one illustration to the first issue of “900”, placed with the fragment of Ulysses in the French translation by Auguste Morel. The image is clearly identifiable as a Leopold Bloom-like figure, yet is perhaps not a direct illustration (what are we to make of the Ostende tourist poster in the background?). It is dated 1925 in the lower corner and is captioned ‘Illustration’ at the foot. No earlier illustration of Bloom is known (nor indeed any earlier illustration of Ulysses) and the standard idea of him is drawn partly from Joyce’s own inept sketch of him made in Paris in 1926.

Joyce was nominally a joint editor of the radical literary review “900”, with Massimo Bontempelli. Mariette Lydis was Bontempelli’s lover at this period (her letters to him are preserved at the Getty Institute) and probably also know Joyce. She sketched his portrait the following year in Paris.

The Ulysses excerpt translated by Morel is episode 4, ‘Calypso’, introducing Leopold Bloom with his morning visit to the butcher’s shop for a kidney for Molly’s breakfast. James Joyce is listed among the journal’s editors on the half-title verso (along with Bontempelli, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Jerog Kaiser and Pierre Mac Orlan). Among the adverts at the end of the volume is a full-page for the forthcoming German edition of Ulysses by Rheinverlag of Zurich (the book appeared in the autumn of 1927). Another advert is for the journal Critica Fascista (a ’Fornightly Fascist Review’). Slocum & Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce (953), D25 (p. 113).

Cf. King 733 (Albert Warren, probably the same binding, but edition of Menzies, Edinburgh, 1858). Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

Not in King, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

Not in King, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

King 202 (Albert Warren). Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

Not in King, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

King 174 (John Leighton). Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

Not in King, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).

King 746 (by Albert Warren). Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003).