Frank Harris, Prospectus for "My Life and Loves". Undated, 1921-22. Self-Published: Paris. Softcover Octavo Pamphlet, 4 pp.
An inveterate traveler, Frank Harris was a polymath of the cultural margins: libertine, sexologist, left-wing journalist, outspoken pacifist, novelist, artist, cowboy, and editor. His multi-volume autobiography My Life and Loves was banned from sale in the U.S. and many other countries due to its sexual explicitness. Full of bravado, Harris nonetheless advocates throughout the text against misogynist (as well as racist) approaches to sexuality, focusing on female pleasure.
In the prospectus, Harris claims that the autobiography shall present his proposal for a new basis of human society uniting Paganism and Christianity and the rejection of the, "combative Anglo-Saxon and Germanic ideal which must result, as he believes in constant warfare and the ultimate mastery of one race and not perhaps the finest, though the strongest."
Harris was already suffered censorship for his agitation against American involvement in World War I, and in order to avoid it, the autobiography was planned from the start as a private run paid for ahead of time by direct subscription from individual readers, and printed in Weimar Berlin. This rare prospectus for the book emphasizes, rather than downplays, the book's scandalous nature, soliciting members of the intellectual libertine/erotica network. The Revenant Archive also contains a first-edition copy of the initial volume of the book, which this prospectus solicited the funds to print.
The entire text is readable in the scans above.
Regarding the Revenant Archive's copy of the book itself:
Frank Harris, My Life and Loves. 1922. 1st Edition. Privately Printed, Paris.
Read a Later Edition Online
This copy, in well-used condition with detached boards and a torn title-page, is one of the few printed for the small first edition. It could only be circulated if privately printed, in sub-commercial quantity, without a publishing imprint (the reader is directed to Harris' home address in Paris); even the printing itself had to be done in Germany. It was pre-paid by privately-solicited subscription, not unlike today's crowdfunding, and the archive also owns one of the promotional pamphlets soliciting them, also privately printed (see ephemera). The implication is that this book's original owner was either personally acquainted with Harris, or was active in libertine/free love networks that intersected with those of Harris.
Harris was already suffered censorship for his agitation against American involvement in World War I, and in order to avoid it, the autobiography was planned from the start as a private run paid for ahead of time by direct subscription from individual readers, and printed in Weimar Berlin. This rare prospectus for the book emphasizes, rather than downplays, the book's scandalous nature, soliciting members of the intellectual libertine/erotica network. The Revenant Archive also contains a first-edition copy of the initial volume of the book, which this prospectus solicited the funds to print.
The entire text is readable in the scans above.
Regarding the Revenant Archive's copy of the book itself:
Frank Harris, My Life and Loves. 1922. 1st Edition. Privately Printed, Paris.
This copy, in well-used condition with detached boards and a torn title-page, is one of the few printed for the small first edition. It could only be circulated if privately printed, in sub-commercial quantity, without a publishing imprint (the reader is directed to Harris' home address in Paris); even the printing itself had to be done in Germany. It was pre-paid by privately-solicited subscription, not unlike today's crowdfunding, and the archive also owns one of the promotional pamphlets soliciting them, also privately printed (see ephemera). The implication is that this book's original owner was either personally acquainted with Harris, or was active in libertine/free love networks that intersected with those of Harris.
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