Search

Folio (290 × 230 mm), pp. [4] (one bifolium). Browned, some marginal creasing.

[with:] Supplément au Manifeste technique de la littérature futuriste. [Milan: A. Talveggia for Direction du Mouvement futuriste, 1912]. Browned, some marginal creasing, fore-edge quite chipped.

First editions in French (simultaneous with the Italian issues) of Marinetti’s Futurist manifestos for literature: ‘Sitting on the gas tank of an aeroplane, my stomach warmed by the pilot’s head, I sensed the ridiculous inanity of the old syntax inherited from Homer. A pressing need to liberate words, to drag them out of their prison in the Latin period!’

[MARINETTI, F. T.] Le Music-Hall. Manifeste futuriste publié par le “Daily-Mail,” 21 Novembre 1913. [Milan: A. Talveggia for Direction du Mouvement futuriste, 1913].

Folio (290 × 230 mm), pp. [4] (one bifolium). Browned, some creasing, chipping and short tears at margins, but generally sound.

First edition of Marinetti’s manifesto on the music hall. Though dated 29 September 1913, publication postdated the abridged version published in English in the Daily Mail on November 21, 1913, where it was attributed to ‘the only intelligible Futurist’). Issued simultaneously in Italian in this pamphlet form. It lays out the Futurists’ enthusiasm for Music Hall as an anti-academic art form, not bound by tradition, with its speed and mechanical novelty, its use of cinematography to create effects unheard of in the theatre, and its genuine collaboration with the audience, among many other perceived advantages over conventional theatre. It ends with a typically Futurist typographical performance incorporating adverts for Manoli cigarettes. Marinetti had been lecturing in London in 1913 and his various pronouncements were eagerly covered by the press. It was not until the eve of war in 1914 that he put his manifesto into practice, giving presentations at London’s largest music hall, the Coliseum — events which were greeted with a degree of bemusement by a distracted British public.

--- La Danse futuriste. Danse de l’Aviateur - Danse du Shrapnell - Danse de la Mitrailleuse. [Milan: A. Tareggia for Direction du Mouvement futuriste, 1917].

Folio (290 × 230 mm), pp. [4] (one bifolium). Browned, some creasing, chipping and short tears at margins, but generally sound.

First edition in French (and probably the first separate edition) the Italian text having previously appeared in the journal Italia futurista of 8 July 1917. Marinetti’s manifesto for dance applies the Futurist programme prioritising action, violence and speed to contemporary dance. He considers the innovations brought to European dance by Argentine tango (’spasme furieux’) and other South American forms, he is equivocal about the langorous style of Isadora Duncan but more enthusiastic about Loïe Fuller, before coming to the point: ‘La danse futuriste sera: Inharmonieuse - Disgracieuse - Asymétrique - Dynamique - Motlibriste’. He then gives detailed accounts of three such dances: Danse de l’Aviateur - Danse du Shrapnell - Danse de la Mitrailleuse. Carteret 418.

First edition of this rare offprint from the Gazette des tribunaux reporting the case and outcome surrounding the publication of Marie-Antoinette’s library catalogue, edited by Louis Lacour and printed as Livres du boudoir de la reine Marie Antoinette. Catalogue authentique et original for Jules Gay. Bibliographically and politically fascinating, the case was brought by the state against Lacour and Gay, alleging that the rights to the manuscript catalogue remained with the state, and that Lacour and Gay had sought to publish it for immoral reasons. It seems that it was this second contention that was the primary motive for bringing the case: with the Appendix here explaining that certain monarchical Legitimists had objected to Marie-Antoinette’s name being blackened further through the presentation of her private reading material - the books of the boudoir being widely considered trivial. There is also a discussion of the extent to which the manuscript catalogue really represented the queen’s reading matter, or simply an assemblage of fashionable books. The matter was decided in favour of Lacour and Gay, the former apparently arranging for this offprint - with manuscript dedications at the rear (obliterated in this copy). WorldCat: Bn, BL, Oxford (Law Library) and Michigan.

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 a charming illustrated guide by the bibliophile journalist–photographer Jérôme Doucet (1865–1957) to the various ‘little trades’ plied on the streets of turn-of-the-century Paris, from tram rail cleaner to map seller, lamplighter to bootblack, cigar end collector to saw sharpener, marshmallow vendor to bill sticker, ragmen and organ grinders to women carding stuffing for mattresses, people renting chairs or toy boats, or selling ice cream, or chestnuts, or chickweed, or mistletoe, or lettuce, or soup. And, naturally, les bouquinistes.

First separate edition, with illustrations by Maclaren himself and his friends, recounting a visit to Paris in 1878 to see the sights (Notre-Dame, Saint-Sulpice, the Panthéon, Napoleon’s tomb, Versailles, the Père Lachaise cemetery, the Jardin des Plantes, etc) as well as the Exposition Universelle.
Library Hub Discover locates 3 copies only: BL, NLS, Trinity College Dublin.

First edition of this classic belle époque survey of the culture of the café-concert and the circus. Ibels was one of the major commercial graphic artists of the period and a collaborator of Toulouse-Lautrec’s.

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, 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).

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, Harvard, 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.

First trade edition of a novel which had first appeared in a small edition (between 25 and 40 copies) privately circulated in December 1823. Ourika, based on fact, and influenced by Rousseau and Chateaubriand, is the complex story of a black African child raised in aristocratic circles in Revolutionary France. It is the first fully developed attempt to portray a black heroine in Europe and the first French novel with a black female narrator. This edition bears the statement on the verso of the half-title ‘Publié au profit d’un établissement de charité, and has no edition statement on the title-page, which bears a quotation from Byron (as called for). A true best-seller, at least four editions appeared in 1824, together with four plays and two poems based on the novel.

First edition. A striking early Lydis production. Each plate is accompanied by an exotic love lyric by Schwabach (publisher, author and patron of Expressionism) ‘Die verliebten Billete des Prinzen Salamu’. 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. One of 1100 copies (of which 100 were signed).