Poetry and Fiction written within early avant-garde communities .
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Pierre Albert-Birot, Memoires d’Adam. 1943. First Limited Ed. of 200 copies. Éditions Balzac: Paris. Sextodecimo paperback, 171 pp.
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Pierre Albert-Birot, Aux trente-deux vents (To the Thirty-Two Winds). Forward by Henri Chopin, 1970. One of 145 Press Copies from a Limited Edition of 906. SIC: Paris. Softcover Quarto, 78 pp.
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Charles Vion d'Alibray, Oeuvres Poetiqes [Parts 3-6, Lacking Title Page]. 1653. Publisher's Imprint Missing. Hardcover 16-mo in original 17th-century binding. Inscribed and dated by Nicholas Penel, 1660 Paris, with list of books.
Charles Vion d'Alibray was a mostly-forgotten satirical writer of the 17th Century, who frequented many of the literary cabarets of his day and was associated with Saint-Amant, Scarron, and others later championed by underground Romanticists and Bohemians such as Théophile Gautier in his Grotesques.
As of the time of its acquisition in March 2024, this was the oldest item in the collection. The original reader of this copy was one Nicolaus Penel, apparently a Paris surgeon. "1600 / Paris" is inscribed on the inside board, and on the title page in Latin: "Nicolaus Penel / Verus se posessor / hicus Libri. anno Domini. / 1666" (Nicolaus Penel / is the true owner / of this book. In the year of the lord / 1666", followed by an unintelligible line, and "hic Liber est Nicolai / Penel" ("This book is Nicolas Penel's".
The flyleaf is covered with a handwritten "Liste des livres" ("BookList") in no easily discernible order, covering a variety of medical, literary, and satirical titles. It is unclear whether this is a list of books owned, sought, etc. and why the list was kept here.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Louis Aragon, Aragon: Poet of the French Resistance, ed. Hannah Josephson & Malcolm Cowley. 1945. Duell, Sloan & Pearce: New York. Hardcover 16-mo . 167 pp.
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Théodore Banville, Esquisses Parisiennes (Parisian Sketches). Undated (1859). Poulet-Malassis (Uncredited – frontispiece missing?): Paris. Hardbound Sextodecimo, 434 pp. First
Edition, with inscription by the author: “À mon ami Edouard Plouvier /
son vieux et fidèle ami / Théodore Banville” (“To my friend Edouard
Plouvier / his old and faithful friend”) + stamp: “28me Reg’
d’Infanterie / Bibliothèque / des Sous-Officiers.
Théodore
Banville was a fixture in the french avant-garde for over fifty years,
and an important link between the Romanticist and Parnassian
generations. This collection of satirical stories about modern Parisian
life and culture was published by Poulet-Mallasis, who had published
Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil two years earlier. This well-read copy was a gift to his friend, the playwright and poet Eduard Plouvier, and later ended up in the regimental library of an army unit.
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Théodore de Banville, Odes Funambulesques. (Tightrope-Walking Odes) 1859. 2nd Edition. Michel Levy Frères, Paris. Sextodecimo, 297 pp. Stamp of "Reunion des officiers de Marseille." Text corrections and marginalia by previous 19th Century owner, so far unidentified. First Edition was published in 1857.
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Banville was a central node of the second-generation Avant-Garde
network, the Parnassians in particular. He was a close friend of Gautier, Nerval, and other older
Romanticists, as well as his own younger generation including Baudelaire, Nadar, Mallarmé, Mendés, and many
others, especially the Romanticist historians/archivists Champfleury and
Charles Asselineau. Along with the latter two, he was at the forefront
of the community's historiographic efforts, as this book shows. At
first published anonymously, it is a collection of satirical verses
about the avant-garde community, and thus a glimpse into the kind of
debate that today is often played out in facebook comments; the poems
range from light-hearted raillery to savage criticism to drily
introspective observations on the trajectory of progressive culture.
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Auguste Barbier, Iambes et Poèmes. 1841. 4th Ed. Paul Masgana, Paris. Sextodecimo, 287 pp. Leather spine, skin scraped from boards.
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Roger de Beauvoir, Le Chavalier de Saint-Georges. 1840. 1st Ed. Dumont: Paris. Four Volumes: Sextodecimo, 1,262 pp. Owned/Signed by A. Spens.
The Bohemian-Dandy Roger de Beauvoir was a co-founder of the Bohême
Doyenné group, along with several ex-Bouzingos such as Théophile
Gautier, Louis Boulanger, the Devéria brothers, Nerval, and others (see
elsewhere in archive); as part of this group he was instrumental in
bringing about the fusion of Dandyism and Romanticism which would soon
be explored by Baudelaire, Verlaine, and others. He probably wrote this
biographical novel while living in the group’s Romanticist haven in the
Rue Doyenné, after which they were named. The book is based on the life
of the mulatto musician and soldier known as the Chevalier de
Saint-Georges. The son of a colonial landlord and a slave, Saint-Georges
rose to become a favourite court composer for the French royal family
and was known as the ‘black Mozart’; at the time of the Revolution, he
organised and led a regiment of black troops in the Revolutionary Army
(in which the father of Beauvoir’s friend Alexandre Dumas had served).
Due to his history with the royal family he was persecuted by the
Jacobin government on trumped-up corruption charges, narrowly escaped
the guillotine, and ended his life destitute and forgotten. Beauvoir’s
preface contained an outspoken attack not only on the institution of
slavery itself, but on the European colonialization of the Americas
generally, remarking that:
“In 1492, Christopher Columbus conquered the New World. Before 1592, the greater part of the primitive population of the New World is exterminated by the whites. By 1692, the whites think to transport the blacks to the very country whose population they have exterminated. Louis XIV publishes the Code of the Blacks. This race is assimilated to beasts of burden, the jews themselves are less oppressed. Therefore it is posited that the black or coloured man is deprived of the gift of intelligence.”
Though in fictionalised form, this was the first book ever written on
Saint-George and Beauvoir did a great deal of original research,
including interviews with people who had known him, laying the
groundwork for further study of Saint-George.
The copy's owner "A. Spens" has not been identified.
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Roger de Beauvoir, Le Chavalier de Saint-Georges. 1840. 2nd Ed.. Bibliothèque Choisie, H.-L. Delloye, Paris. Four Volumes: Sextodecimo, 780 pp.
See entry above; The same year as this corrected second edition was printed, he also mounted a one-act play based on the Chevalier’s life.
Pierre-Jean Béranger, Chansons de Béranger [Béranger's Songs] & Chansons Nouvelles [New Songs]. Two volumes bound together, 1833 & 1846. Publishers unknown – lacks frontispieces. Hardcover 64-mo, 992 pp. total, numbered pp.1-636 and pp. 209-565.
See entry above; The same year as this corrected second edition was printed, he also mounted a one-act play based on the Chevalier’s life.
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Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887. 1889. Houghton, Mifflin and Company: Boston & New York. Clothbound hardcover octavo, 337 pp. Inscribed in pencil "From the library / of / H. A. Caprin"[?] + erased inscription [possibly a date] in upper right of flyleaf.
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Pierre-Jean Béranger, Chansons de Béranger [Béranger's Songs] & Chansons Nouvelles [New Songs]. Two volumes bound together, 1833 & 1846. Publishers unknown – lacks frontispieces. Hardcover 64-mo, 992 pp. total, numbered pp.1-636 and pp. 209-565.
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Georges Berry, Louis XIV & Molière: A propos en vers. 1880. Sole Edition. Tresse, Paris. Copy owned by Avant-Garde historian, archivist & writer Jules Claretie (see "Historiography"). Inscribed by author: "A Jules Claretie / Bien faite [?] Hommage à l'auteur / G. Berry". Light marginalia by Claretie, p. 6. Pamphlet, later hard-bound, probably by subsequent owner.
The Bibliophile Jacob [Paul Lacroix], Contes du Bibliophile Jacob à ses Petits-Enfans. (The Bibliophile Jacob's Tales to his Little Children. Vol. 2. 1830. First Edition. Louis Janet: Paris. Hardbound Full-leather 16-mo w/ three full-colour lithographs tipped-in, 344 pp.
Ambrose Bierce, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. 1891. 1st Edition, Privately Printed. E.L.G. Steele, San Francisco. Inscribed by M.J. Sanders, Bookplate of Tully M. Sanders, with 2 Newspaper Clippings.
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Bierce inherited the Gothic tradition as re-imagined by Poe, married it to savage satire and a naturalist voice, and in this collection of stories presented one of the very first sustained efforts at anti-war literature, articulated through supernatural horror. He was in turn one of the major influences on Chambers (see book below), Lovecraft, and Weird Fiction generally, in which his city of Carcossa, the fictional god Hali, and others have entered the Cthulic pantheon.
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Aloysius [Louis] Bertrand was one of the most experimental writers of the first-generation avant-garde, and was frequently cited as a precursor by Baudelaire, the Symbolists, and the Surrealists. Bertrand is often credited as the (paradoxically) unacknowledged inventor of the prose-poem; in fact discussions and experiments regarding the form had been going on since the late 18th Century, but in this book Bertrand systematically developed it to its full potential, and in his Preface to Paris Spleen Baudelaire states that Gaspar de la nuit was the inspiration and guiding model of his own collection of prose poems. Bertrand's work, like Nerval's, often seems to envelop a second discourse within it regarding his activity with occult, alchemical, and mystical research and practice.
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Aloysius Bertrand, Gaspard de la nuit (Treasurer of Night or Caspar/Magus of the night or Night Rat). 1957. No. 483 of Edition of 12,000 copies. Le Club français du Livre: Paris. 237 pp. Cloth-bound Hardcover Octavo.
Aloysius [Louis] Bertrand was one of the most experimental writers of the first-generation avant-garde, and was frequently cited as a precursor by Baudelaire, the Symbolists, and the Surrealists. Bertrand is often credited as the (paradoxically) unacknowledged inventor of the prose-poem; in fact discussions and experiments regarding the form had been going on since the late 18th Century, but in this book Bertrand systematically developed it to its full potential, and in his Preface to Paris Spleen Baudelaire states that Gaspar de la nuit was the inspiration and guiding model of his own collection of prose poems. Bertrand's work, like Nerval's, often seems to envelop a second discourse within it regarding his activity with occult, alchemical, and mystical research and practice.
Bertrand's
collection was set for publication in 1833, but stalled for years, due
probably to lack of funding. During the entire course of its composition
he was slowly dying of tuberculosis, and when the book finally
appeared, it was a year after his death in a Paris pauper's hospital in
which he had taken refuge without informing his friends; only by chance
did the Romanticist sculptor David d'Angers stumble upon him there a few
weeks before his death. The book finally appeared, in a very small run,
the following year. It was reprinted intermittently over the course of
the following century, but always by small underground presses in very
small editions. By the time this edition was published, Bertrand's work
was finally becoming available in France.
Like many
Frenetic Romantics, Bertrand was deeply involved with philology and
linguistics, as reflected in the title; 'Gaspard' is an extremely rare
and archaic word with several possible meanings, ranging from the name
of one of the Three Magi to slang for 'rat'.
The Bibliophile Jacob [Paul Lacroix], Contes du Bibliophile Jacob à ses Petits-Enfans. (The Bibliophile Jacob's Tales to his Little Children. Vol. 2. 1830. First Edition. Louis Janet: Paris. Hardbound Full-leather 16-mo w/ three full-colour lithographs tipped-in, 344 pp.
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Ambrose Bierce, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. 1891. 1st Edition, Privately Printed. E.L.G. Steele, San Francisco. Inscribed by M.J. Sanders, Bookplate of Tully M. Sanders, with 2 Newspaper Clippings.
Bierce inherited the Gothic tradition as re-imagined by Poe, married it to savage satire and a naturalist voice, and in this collection of stories presented one of the very first sustained efforts at anti-war literature, articulated through supernatural horror. He was in turn one of the major influences on Chambers (see book below), Lovecraft, and Weird Fiction generally, in which his city of Carcossa, the fictional god Hali, and others have entered the Cthulic pantheon.
This copy was kept with clipping from St. Paul Pioneer Press (no date) regarding new information regarding Bierce's disappearance in Mexico and probable execution or murder by Pancho Villa, and a second clipping (unidentified source shortly before to outbreak of World War II) of essay on Bierce by H.L. Mencken.
Tully Sanders was the uncle of the Evolutionary researcher and utopian theorist David Loye, who has written extensively on Tully and the rest of is family in the book-length memoir Brave Laughter. Sanders, it is clear, appreciated Bierce fully, and treasured this first edition, which was privately financed by a patron after the book was refused by all the publishing houses in America (it had been published in the UK a year previously under the title Can Such Things Be?)
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Petrus Borel was a co-founder and leader of the Jeunes-France / Bouzingo group, a key theorist of the first-generation avant-garde, one of the most prominent and politically outspoken Romanticist organizers and agitators of his generation, and the standard-bearer for the revolutionary-gothic subculture known as Frenetic Romanticism. Despite--or perhaps because of--all this, his presence even within the avant-garde has been almost occult since his death, only a few years after the beginning of the Third Empire, under which any public celebration of this flamboyantly transgressive figure would have been politically dangerous--and indeed his memory was kept alive during this time primarily among Leftist-Romanticist communities (the first biography of Borel was written by Jules Claretie, a historian of revolutionary movements and a member of the Paris Commune (see below). Nonetheless, Borel has been read by and exercised a strong influence upon a small but active element of the avant-garde ever since, including Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Claretie, Jarry, Tzara, and Breton; there seems to have been about one edition of Rhapsodies, his only book of poems, published per generation, usually in runs of around 300. The poems intertwine Byronic misanthropy, political protests, esoteric intertextuality with themes of werewolves, vampires, and murderers with a sardonic and grim humor. Nearly every poem in the book is dedicated to, or headed by epigraphs of, Borel's Romanticist friends and comrades. This book is one of 250 printed in 1884 (the same year as Huysmans' a Rebours (see below)) for the French Decadent community. Due to its liberal censorship laws, Belgium had been the centre of Libertine, Decadent, erotic, and politically radical publishing since the eighteenth century, and it is not surprising to see the book published in Brussels, which was at that time one of the largest and most active avant-garde communities in Europe.
The impact of George Gordon, Lord Byron's influence on European Romanticism generally cannot be overstated, but his significance for the radical elements within French Romanticism was unique. In his fusion of Gothic horror with experimental poetry, in his merging of art and life in his dramatic and dark self-presentation, in his convergence of Liberal politics with Libertinism, and in his mixture of irony with melancholy and misanthropy, he served as the key model of Frenetic Romanticism. Byron, like Hugo after him, was able to straddle the intellectual and popular worlds, and was among the most famous men in the West. This book (numbered Vol. III of a collection of his work) seems to be composed of signatures from two separate volumes, published by different publishers in different cities, bound together--not an unknown practice in the 19th Century. The Bride of Abydos is a tale of incest and murder in the near East, in an experimental 'organic' verse form; The Corsaire is one of the poems that did most to establish the brooding, misanthropic 'Byronic Hero' which would become a defining myth in avant-garde subculture through most of the 19th Century.
Étienne Cabet, Voyage en Icarie (Voyage to Icaria). 5th Ed. 1848. Bureau du Populaire: Paris. Softcover 16-mo, 600 pp.
Lewis Carroll w/John Tenniel, Alice in Wonderland. 1871. Lee & Shepard, Publishers, Boston. First edition was 1865.
Not a representative of the avant-garde per se, but a landmark in the development of the vernacular tradition of Nonsense literature exemplified by Lear. Carroll unquestionably represented one of the most culturally pervasive questionings of society's relationship with language and knowledge, which within a generation was experienced early in the formation of children's approaches to the world; and was an acknowledged influence in the avant-garde at least by of the end of the century. Tenniel, who created the iconic illustrations to the book, was a satirist regularly published in Punch. This copy has certainly spent time in some kids' rooms over the last 140 years, but for all that is in pretty good shape.
Robert W. Chambers, The Maids of Paradise. 1903. 1st Edition. Harper & Brothers, New York.
After training as a painter in Paris during the height of the Decadent movement, Chambers returned to America and wrote the cycle of horror stories revolving around the mysterious Yellow Sign, and a banned Decadent-Symbolist play, The King in Yellow, which communicates a very peculiar form of Madness in anybody who reads past the first act. Incorporating elements of Bierce's fantastic cities and figures (see above) into his own corpus, Chambers developed the developed the seed of the intertextual mythos of Weird Fiction that would be brought to maturity by Lovecraft a generation later. After two collections of horror, Chambers became seduced by mainstream success, and spent the rest of his life writing best-selling adventure, comic, and domestic novels. This book is one of those: a semi-fictional (or so Chambers claims in the premise) spy story set during the Franco-Prussian War. It is illustrated by an uncredited an unremarkable draftsman. As it happens, this is published by Harper & Brothers, the same press which put out the 1846 edition of Eugéne Sue's Wandering Jew (see Book below) and Merill's Pastels in Prose (see "Anthologies") in 1890; certain of his tales and cycles of prose-poems bear the strong influence of symbolist prose-poems such as those translated in the latter. This copy, in remarkably good condition, cost $3 at the library book sale in Charlottesville, VA.
Champfleury, The Faïence Violin. 1895. trans. Helen B. Dole. Thomas Y Crowell & Company: New York.
Champfleury, M. Tringle. Illustrated by Lèonce Petit. 1868. Librarie de L. Hachette, Paris.
Interested in every aspect of sexuality, Gourmont here explores the sensuality of virginity and adolescence. One result of this theme is that the novel was one of the few Decadent texts not subject to censorship laws prohibiting sale on the open market; this edition was printed in large numbers by the respectable Modern Library.
For the last decades of his life, Gourmont was afflicted with a disfiguring skin disease and lived a hermetic life, rarely seeing anyone but his life-long lover, the avant-garde occultist Berthe Courrière. He produced a large and varied corpus of some of the most intellectually complex, metaphysically infused, textually dense erotica ever written. The range of this writing was great—from stories of incubi, succubi, and sensual ghosts and angels in the tradition of Gautier, to closely observed psychological descriptions of passing flirtations; from linguistically impenetrable prose-poems to simple and sympathetic slices of life; from sado-masochistic Satanism to subtle explorations of virginity. Colors collects a series of his less hallucinatory erotic short stories, each indirectly spun off from an association based in Symbolist theories of colour, perception, and psychology. Like most of Gourmont’s work translated in the years after his death, this was subject to strict censorship laws in the US, and was thus printed as a private edition by the underground Panurge Press,—named after Rabelais’ paragon of Libertines (see ‘Influences’). The cover, in bright red hand-tooled leather, is one of which any Decadent and Symbolist would be proud.
Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins. 1893. 1st Edition. The Cassell Publishing Co., New York.
Victor Hugo, Hernani. 1891. Student’s edition w/English Introduction and Notes by John E. Matzke. D.C. Heath’s Modern Language Series, Boston.
Joris-Karl Huysmans, A Rebours (Against the Grain / Against Nature). 1931. Introduction by Havelock Ellis, Illustrations by Arthus Zaidenberg. Illustrated Editions, New York.
A Rebours is, of course, the most well-known and comprehensive portrait of the Decadent community of the 1880s, the epitome of the orientation within the avant-garde begun by Gautier, Nerval, and the Bohême Doyenné/ Assassins' Club groups in the late 1830s and '40s. This edition is not from the 19th Century, but represents a step in the 30+ year struggle for Anglophone avant-gardists to get a complete, uncensored translation published (One translation of an Huysmans prose-poem does appear in Merrill's 1890 Pastels in Prose anthology, see "Anthologies"). This edition, which I have not definitively identified in the bibliographic record, may have been of dubious legality. It is introduced by Havelock Ellis, a psychologist and writer who was one of the first to write extensively and objectively about transgender issues and other transgressive sexual practices, and had a substantial influence on Freud. Interestingly, this beautifully scuffed-up American edition was discovered in the UK by Alan Reed.
Ambrose Bierce, In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. 1892. Bernhard Tauchnitz, Leipzig. Collection of British Authors, Tauchnitz Edition, Vol. 2814. Inscribed in pen: "Joe. Lorraiur[?]. / NY City." Inscribed in pencil in different hand: "This collection of [Liour???] are the most powerful ever penned by man / L.L." With light marginalia in pencil by previous owner (p 132).
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Pétrus Borel (The Lycanthrope), Madame Putiphar: Vol. 2. 1878. Léon Willem, ed., Paris. Hardcover Octavo, 312 pp.
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Pétrus Borel, Rhapsodies. 1884. Bibliotheque Galante, Aug. Brancart ed., Brussels. Limited Ed. of 250. Reprint of 1832 ed.
Petrus Borel was a co-founder and leader of the Jeunes-France / Bouzingo group, a key theorist of the first-generation avant-garde, one of the most prominent and politically outspoken Romanticist organizers and agitators of his generation, and the standard-bearer for the revolutionary-gothic subculture known as Frenetic Romanticism. Despite--or perhaps because of--all this, his presence even within the avant-garde has been almost occult since his death, only a few years after the beginning of the Third Empire, under which any public celebration of this flamboyantly transgressive figure would have been politically dangerous--and indeed his memory was kept alive during this time primarily among Leftist-Romanticist communities (the first biography of Borel was written by Jules Claretie, a historian of revolutionary movements and a member of the Paris Commune (see below). Nonetheless, Borel has been read by and exercised a strong influence upon a small but active element of the avant-garde ever since, including Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Claretie, Jarry, Tzara, and Breton; there seems to have been about one edition of Rhapsodies, his only book of poems, published per generation, usually in runs of around 300. The poems intertwine Byronic misanthropy, political protests, esoteric intertextuality with themes of werewolves, vampires, and murderers with a sardonic and grim humor. Nearly every poem in the book is dedicated to, or headed by epigraphs of, Borel's Romanticist friends and comrades. This book is one of 250 printed in 1884 (the same year as Huysmans' a Rebours (see below)) for the French Decadent community. Due to its liberal censorship laws, Belgium had been the centre of Libertine, Decadent, erotic, and politically radical publishing since the eighteenth century, and it is not surprising to see the book published in Brussels, which was at that time one of the largest and most active avant-garde communities in Europe.
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Joseph Bouchardy, Paris le Bohémien: Drame en cinq actes (Paris the Bohemian: Drama in Five Acts) 1842. Sole Edition. Théatre de la Porte Saint-Martin & Dondey-Dupré: Paris. Softcover Octavo, 36 pp.
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Though virtually forgotten today, Joseph Bouchardy was a co-founder of the Bouzingo group, the first self-declared “avant-garde” collective, blending political radicalism, gothic-horror subculture, experimental literature and art, and the transformation of everyday life. Trained in England as an engraver, back in France he soon turned to playwriting, and produced many blockbuster melodramas full of deception, disguise, double-crossing, violence, and convoluted, labyrinthine plots often taking place in labyrinthine settings--delighted when he was able to construct plots so complex that he even lost track of them himself. Paris the Bohemian is such a play. The first performance, as noted at the head of this paperback script, starred Fréderick Lemaître, the leading Romanticist actor, in the starring role. Incidentally, the chapbook is published by Dondey-Dupré, the extended family of Bouchardy's Bouzingo collaborator Philothée O'Neddy--though this has more to do with the sponsorship of the Théatre de la Porte Saint-Martin than with O'Neddy, for they were not sympathetic to the Romanticist cause.
Though virtually forgotten today, Joseph Bouchardy was a co-founder of the Bouzingo group, the first self-declared “avant-garde” collective, blending political radicalism, gothic-horror subculture, experimental literature and art, and the transformation of everyday life. Trained in England as an engraver, back in France he soon turned to playwriting, and produced many blockbuster melodramas full of deception, disguise, double-crossing, violence, and convoluted, labyrinthine plots often taking place in labyrinthine settings--delighted when he was able to construct plots so complex that he even lost track of them himself. Paris the Bohemian is such a play. The first performance, as noted at the head of this paperback script, starred Fréderick Lemaître, the leading Romanticist actor, in the starring role. Incidentally, the chapbook is published by Dondey-Dupré, the extended family of Bouchardy's Bouzingo collaborator Philothée O'Neddy--though this has more to do with the sponsorship of the Théatre de la Porte Saint-Martin than with O'Neddy, for they were not sympathetic to the Romanticist cause.
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Alphonse Brot & Saint-Véran, Le Déesse Raison (The Goddess Reason). 1880. Dentu: Paris. Sextodecimo, softcover, 369 pp. Bookplate of Lucien Puteaux (aka Victor Perceval).
Byron, The Bride of Abydos & The Corsaire. 1814. Moses Thomas, Philadelphia and Eastburn, & Co., New York. Inscribed w/light marginalia by Laura Woolsey (19th Century) & "Merry Christmas / -1981- / Uncle Walter".
Alphonse Brot is among the most enigmatic members of the Bouzingo group. He is the earliest person to go on record as self-identifying as a member of "l'avant-garde," in his 'Preface to Song of Love and Other Poems,'
published in 1829. Yet he explicitly bases this solidarity on the
avant-garde's leftist political commitments; he was particularly close
to O'Neddy and to Franz Lizst,
both at the time keenly interested in Saint-Simonism and other
proto-Socialist moveents, along with others in underground Romanticism.
But formally, he advocates for a middle-ground or synthesis between
Romanticism and Classicism, and his close friend O'Neddy later remarked that the group felt he lacked commitment to the Romanticist cause.
After
the dissolution of the Bouzingo, his path seems to have drifted away
from the avant-garde (at least in its Romanticist form). He appears to
have ceased writing poetry, and devoted himself to novels and plays,
which sold successfully for the next sixty years; for two years he was
co-director of the Théâtre Ambigu-Comique, which specialised in popular
melodrama for the lower classes. Despite his popularity at the time, he
seems not to have been read at all from within a few years of his death.
In the avant-garde, too, his name disappears from the discourse
entirely after 1833, with the single exception of the O'Neddy letter
referred/linked to above.
But
despite this apparent apostasy, continuities seem to exist. On the one
hand, many of his popular novels and melodramas seem to continue the
gothic-Romanticist tradition of exaggerated violence, passion, and
transgression; several of his titles, moreover, suggest themes related
to revolution and resistance to tyranny (cf. Pray For Them, Karl Sand
(a leftist German poet-martyr), and possibly this volume, which takes
place during the French Revolution. On the other hand, enticingly, when
in 1866 a group of avant-garde poets advocated for a new, experimental
synthesis between Classicism and Romanticism, they designated themselves
by a name that Brot used, in the very same paragraph, as a synomym for
what he called the "avant-garde": the Parnasse Contemporain (Contemporary Parnassus).
I can find no other trace of his collaborator on this novel of the French Revolution, Saint-Véran. The book is published by Dentu (who also published other
popular Romantics such as George Sand and ex-Bouzingo Auguste Macquet).
The
previous owner of the book, Lucien Puteaux, was probably behind the
pseudonym Victor Perceval, who seems to have published volumes of
historical-fiction erotica around this time. In any case Puteaux was
directly involved in the avant-garde; he was close to Alexandre Dumas
and to the Realist 'Batignolles Group' of caricaturists who laid the
groundwork for Impressionism; so his ownership of this book suggests at
least some remnant of currency for Brot in the late-century avant-garde. The Revenant Archive also contains another book owned by Puteaux, Les Grotesques
by Brot's fellow Bouzingo-cofounder Théophile Gautier (see below).
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Byron, The Bride of Abydos & The Corsaire. 1814. Moses Thomas, Philadelphia and Eastburn, & Co., New York. Inscribed w/light marginalia by Laura Woolsey (19th Century) & "Merry Christmas / -1981- / Uncle Walter".
The impact of George Gordon, Lord Byron's influence on European Romanticism generally cannot be overstated, but his significance for the radical elements within French Romanticism was unique. In his fusion of Gothic horror with experimental poetry, in his merging of art and life in his dramatic and dark self-presentation, in his convergence of Liberal politics with Libertinism, and in his mixture of irony with melancholy and misanthropy, he served as the key model of Frenetic Romanticism. Byron, like Hugo after him, was able to straddle the intellectual and popular worlds, and was among the most famous men in the West. This book (numbered Vol. III of a collection of his work) seems to be composed of signatures from two separate volumes, published by different publishers in different cities, bound together--not an unknown practice in the 19th Century. The Bride of Abydos is a tale of incest and murder in the near East, in an experimental 'organic' verse form; The Corsaire is one of the poems that did most to establish the brooding, misanthropic 'Byronic Hero' which would become a defining myth in avant-garde subculture through most of the 19th Century.
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Étienne Cabet, Voyage en Icarie (Voyage to Icaria). 5th Ed. 1848. Bureau du Populaire: Paris. Softcover 16-mo, 600 pp.
The
Icarian movement, an amalgamation of ideas taken from Fourier,
Saint-Simon, and other forms of early Socialism, was founded by the
social theorist Étienne Cabet by means of this hefty utopian novel about
the hypothetical society of Icaria, much of which is taken up with his
appendix propounding the detailed programme by which a non-hypothetical
version of it could be established. He was not slow in accumulating an
Icarian community who came to the US in the year this edition was
published to found a series of intentional communities in Texas,
Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Iowa, and California, the last one lasting
until 1886.
This
copy has been valued and heavily used by at least two generations of
radicals. At least one reader left marginalia – my guess is the original
owner, based on the immediacy of interest suggested by its nature. This
is done in pencil, and stretches throughout the book – all 600 pages
were read in their entirety. Some markings suggest intuitive reactions
to the texts – exclamation and question marks in the passages next to
the related passages. A great many are single underlined words, and look
to me like words unfamiliar to the reader, marked to look up after the
reading session. If this hypothesis is correct, it suggests that french
was likely their second language, and raises the possibility that they
were directly involved with one of the Icarian communes, which were
bilingual; the hypothesis is complicated, however, by the fact that I
bought it from a French bookseller. The alternative possibility is that
the reader was a working-class socialist who was largely self-taught and
encountering words outside their prior reading. Some markings on the
wrapper have been subsequently faded or erased beyond legibility. An
early- or mid-20th Century owner added a few bibliographic notations and
repaired the by-then disintegrating binding with adhesive tape, which
is now disintegrating in turn, after handwriting a new spine title, in a
hand which makes me favour an early-century hypothesis.
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Lewis Carroll w/John Tenniel, Alice in Wonderland. 1871. Lee & Shepard, Publishers, Boston. First edition was 1865.
Not a representative of the avant-garde per se, but a landmark in the development of the vernacular tradition of Nonsense literature exemplified by Lear. Carroll unquestionably represented one of the most culturally pervasive questionings of society's relationship with language and knowledge, which within a generation was experienced early in the formation of children's approaches to the world; and was an acknowledged influence in the avant-garde at least by of the end of the century. Tenniel, who created the iconic illustrations to the book, was a satirist regularly published in Punch. This copy has certainly spent time in some kids' rooms over the last 140 years, but for all that is in pretty good shape.
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Robert W. Chambers, The Maids of Paradise. 1903. 1st Edition. Harper & Brothers, New York.
After training as a painter in Paris during the height of the Decadent movement, Chambers returned to America and wrote the cycle of horror stories revolving around the mysterious Yellow Sign, and a banned Decadent-Symbolist play, The King in Yellow, which communicates a very peculiar form of Madness in anybody who reads past the first act. Incorporating elements of Bierce's fantastic cities and figures (see above) into his own corpus, Chambers developed the developed the seed of the intertextual mythos of Weird Fiction that would be brought to maturity by Lovecraft a generation later. After two collections of horror, Chambers became seduced by mainstream success, and spent the rest of his life writing best-selling adventure, comic, and domestic novels. This book is one of those: a semi-fictional (or so Chambers claims in the premise) spy story set during the Franco-Prussian War. It is illustrated by an uncredited an unremarkable draftsman. As it happens, this is published by Harper & Brothers, the same press which put out the 1846 edition of Eugéne Sue's Wandering Jew (see Book below) and Merill's Pastels in Prose (see "Anthologies") in 1890; certain of his tales and cycles of prose-poems bear the strong influence of symbolist prose-poems such as those translated in the latter. This copy, in remarkably good condition, cost $3 at the library book sale in Charlottesville, VA.
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Champfleury, The Faïence Violin. 1895. trans. Helen B. Dole. Thomas Y Crowell & Company: New York.
Read Online (in English)
As both novelist and theorist, Champfleury was one of the principle formulators and organisers of the Realist movement and in both literature and the plastic arts – he ghost-wrote Courbet's most important manifestos. Although Realism is typically reductively explained as a straightforward "rejection" or "attack" on Romanticism, it should be noted that Champfleury was mentored by the arch-Romantics Gautier and Nerval, and was one of the first group of avant-garde historians to take on the mission of recording the rapidly-vanishing history of avant-garde Romanticism; he wrote the first book on Romanticist illustration, a translation of Hoffman's fantasy stories, several biographies and studies of underground Romantics including Nerval and Houssaye, and Gavarni, one on marginalised "eccentrics" of Paris, and a series of studies of the history of caricature and cartooning (this archive contains his History of Caricature During the Republic, Empire, and Restoration (see Historiography) and his children's book Mr. Tringle, below).
As both novelist and theorist, Champfleury was one of the principle formulators and organisers of the Realist movement and in both literature and the plastic arts – he ghost-wrote Courbet's most important manifestos. Although Realism is typically reductively explained as a straightforward "rejection" or "attack" on Romanticism, it should be noted that Champfleury was mentored by the arch-Romantics Gautier and Nerval, and was one of the first group of avant-garde historians to take on the mission of recording the rapidly-vanishing history of avant-garde Romanticism; he wrote the first book on Romanticist illustration, a translation of Hoffman's fantasy stories, several biographies and studies of underground Romantics including Nerval and Houssaye, and Gavarni, one on marginalised "eccentrics" of Paris, and a series of studies of the history of caricature and cartooning (this archive contains his History of Caricature During the Republic, Empire, and Restoration (see Historiography) and his children's book Mr. Tringle, below).
Despite
his importance to both literary and art history and the huge range and
extent of his writing, Champfleury is virtually unheard-of in the
English-speaking world today. This is one of the few translations of his
work available. It tells the story of an obsessed collector of antique
violins, whose pursuit of a prize instrument leads him into various
quandaries. It is part of a tradition of French literature written about
and for archivists, bibliophiles, and collectors, of which Charles
Nodier and Bibliophile Jacob were major early figures (see the archive's
copy of Bibliophile Jacob/Paul Lacroix's My Republic on this page, for instance). This copy is well-read, its cheaply-produced soft
leather binding chipping apart and its cover detaatched; the interior
remains strongly bound and readable.
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Champfleury, M. Tringle. Illustrated by Lèonce Petit. 1868. Librarie de L. Hachette, Paris.
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Casimir Delavigne, Messéniennes, et poésies diverse. 11th Ed. 1824. Ladvocat: Paris. Quarter-leather Hardcover 16-mo, 199 pp.
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Théophile Gautier, La Comédie de la mort (The Comedy of Death). 1838. First Edition. Desessart, Paris. With text corrections, marginalia, & collaged illustrations from at least three previous owners.
Read Online
This fascinating first-edition copy of one of the final masterpieces of Frenetic Romanticism is one of the most extreme examples in the archive of the trans-generational approach to avant-garde culture from which the Revenant Archive grows, and offers important insight into how reading practices within the avant-garde evolved from 1838 into the Surrealist epoch.
The book and its author played a foundational role in the avant-garde, and though those roles have been almost utterly forgotten within the community today (see the Introduction to the collection of his Collected Works) this copy bears the physical traces of the various ways in which successive generations of avant-garde readers have engaged with his work and legacy, from his own peers into the Surrealist epoch. We can trace at least three distinct readers previous to its arrival in this library:
Reader #1: Probably book's first owner:
The book's first owner was most likely responsible for the carefully-inscribed notes in light pencil to the table of contents in the back of the volume. These notes indicate the poems' subjects and/or first lines, and many reflect the emphasis placed in Romanticist subculture on the social and contextual references in creative work. The owner has also added tick-marks next to his or her favourite pieces, and occasionally corrected lines in the text body--which implies personal knowledge of manuscript or other published versions.
Reader #2: Mid-late 19th Century poet.
A later owner was evidently a poet, as evidenced by several lines scattered through the text which have been marked in pen to examine Gautier's technique within the Alexandrine lines; single words appear a couple times as well, again in pen and possible by the same hand; neither is legible, however. These offer evidence of the predominant aspect of Gautier's influence on the two or three generations (the Parnassians, Decadents and Symbolists) that followed him: the intricate orchestration in his work of sound, rhythm, and distorted syntax.
Above and below, dividing marks have been added to analyze the metric structure of poetic lines.
Reader #3: c. 1935-70, probably Czech or Serbian Surrealist.
The book was purchased from a dealer in Belgrade, who could not recall where they had acquired it (though one would think it would have left an impression-!). They were selling a number of books and journals relating to the Serbian and Czech Surrealist groups at the same time--evidently from the same collection--and so it seems likely that it was somebody associated with Eastern European Surrealism who collaged their own illustrations into the book. The source materials in the collage range from some roughly contemporary with the book's initial publication, up to images apparently printed between the 1930s and '60s. The illustrations respond to the texts and enter into conversation with them, and often take the form of tableaux-headers and decorations framing the titles, recalling Nanteuil's Romanticist illuminations.
Théophile Gautier, La Comédie de la mort (The Comedy of Death). 1838. Pirate Edition. E. Laurent, Brussels.
This small, poorly-printed and irregularly cut paperback was printed the year of the first edition, and is probably a pirate edition. Belgium was notoriously the centre of francophone pirate publishing throughout the 19th Century. Three years after this volume was printed, in the archive's 1841 issue of Les Guêpes (see "Journals"), Gautier's closest friend Nerval reported to Alphonse Karr concerning pirate editions of that magazine being openly marketed in Belgium.
Théophile Gautier, Mlle. de Maupin. 1854. Charpentier, Paris. First Edition was 1835.
Gautier's first full-length novel, a complex text addressing issues of gender (largely exploring questions posed by his fellow Romanticist George Sand (see below), sensuality, and the erotic through the lens of his conception of a Cult of Art. The Preface to the book (written in 1834, the same year as Gautier's contributions to the Annales Romantiques (see above) argued this theory in comprehensive form, articulating a transition from the utopian politics of the Jeunes-France to the more hermetic model he was to promote for the rest of his life.
Théophile Gautier, La Capitaine Fracasse. 1864. Second Edition. Charpentier, Paris. Vol. I of 2.
Théophile Gautier, Romans et Contes (Novels and Tales). 1870. Charpentier, Paris. Sextodecimo, 459 pp. Rebound late 19th/early 20th Century, cover detached. Inscribed by E.W. Huckel, 1908 & C.K. Moses, Dec. 1930 & [???] Lippencott? (effaced), November 1911.
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Casimir Delavigne, Messéniennes, et poésies diverse. 11th Ed. 1824. Ladvocat: Paris. Quarter-leather Hardcover 16-mo, 199 pp.
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Alphonse Esquiros, L'Émile du dix-neuvième siècle (The Nineteenth-Century Émile). 1869. First Edition. Libraire Internationale, Paris. Quarter-Leather Octavo, 422 pp.
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Paul Fort, Ballades Françaises: Hélène en fleur et Charlemagne. 2nd Ed. 1921. Mercure de France: Paris. Softcover, 281 pp. Inscribed
by Fort, "à mon cher / Alfred Vallette / affecteusement / Paul Fort"
("To my dear / Alfred Vallette / affectionately / Paul Fort")
This
inscribed copy links two writers important to the history of Symbolism
and Pataphysics. The dandyist writer Paul Fort was a key figure in the
French avant-garde for over fifty years, and served as an important link
between the Symbolist generation and that of the young Cubist and
proto-Dada writers. For instance, he regularly played billiards with
Apollinaire and Jarry, and in fact the commotion of a bar fight started
by Jarry and involving a pistol with a blank cartridge had precipitated
Fort's wife into early labour. At only 17 years old, Fort had founded
the first independent Symbolist theatre company, known as the Théâtre d'Art. He left the group two years later, when it became the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre and went on to produce Jarry's Ubu Roi. He later edited the Symbolist journal Vers et Prose, and publish many volumes of verse. His daughter was married to the Futurist painter Gino Severini.
The publisher Alfred Vallette was the editor of the Mercure de France,
which began as a small avant-garde Symbolist journal and grew into one
of the most important cultural reviews in France. (The Revenant Archive
owns a copy of the journal, see "Periodicals" tab.) His wife, Rachilde,
was a notorious Decadent novelist--rebellious in her day but later
reactionary ultra-Nationalist; four years after her husband received
this copy from Fort, she was the target of an intervention by Surrealist
group at an avant-garde banquet for the Symbolist Saint-Pol-Roux, a
mutual friend, which ended in a food fight and police raid. In the 1890s
however, the couple had been roommates with Alfred Jarry and Pierre
Quillard at the home they called 'The Phalanstry' in homage to the
Utopian Socialist Charles Fourier. The connections ranged far and wide indeed–Vallette and Rachilde's daughter was even married to Fort's nephew.
Since
Vallette, as the publisher of Fort's book of long-form prose poetry,
had ample access to copies of it, this inscribed copy is primarily the
relic of a gesture to reinforce and re-inscribe the dense network of
relationships between them as writers, publishers, organisers, and
friends. It also appears to have been Valette's copy for a later
re-reading however; it is cut up to page 156, the title page of the
title poem, which is dog-eared, after which it remains uncut.
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David Gascoyne, A Vagrant, and other poems. 1950. First Edition. John Lehmann: London. Clothbound octavo. w/nameplate of Frederick Woods.
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Read Online
This fascinating first-edition copy of one of the final masterpieces of Frenetic Romanticism is one of the most extreme examples in the archive of the trans-generational approach to avant-garde culture from which the Revenant Archive grows, and offers important insight into how reading practices within the avant-garde evolved from 1838 into the Surrealist epoch.
The book and its author played a foundational role in the avant-garde, and though those roles have been almost utterly forgotten within the community today (see the Introduction to the collection of his Collected Works) this copy bears the physical traces of the various ways in which successive generations of avant-garde readers have engaged with his work and legacy, from his own peers into the Surrealist epoch. We can trace at least three distinct readers previous to its arrival in this library:
Reader #1: Probably book's first owner:
Reader #2: Mid-late 19th Century poet.
A later owner was evidently a poet, as evidenced by several lines scattered through the text which have been marked in pen to examine Gautier's technique within the Alexandrine lines; single words appear a couple times as well, again in pen and possible by the same hand; neither is legible, however. These offer evidence of the predominant aspect of Gautier's influence on the two or three generations (the Parnassians, Decadents and Symbolists) that followed him: the intricate orchestration in his work of sound, rhythm, and distorted syntax.
Above and below, dividing marks have been added to analyze the metric structure of poetic lines.
Reader #3: c. 1935-70, probably Czech or Serbian Surrealist.
The book was purchased from a dealer in Belgrade, who could not recall where they had acquired it (though one would think it would have left an impression-!). They were selling a number of books and journals relating to the Serbian and Czech Surrealist groups at the same time--evidently from the same collection--and so it seems likely that it was somebody associated with Eastern European Surrealism who collaged their own illustrations into the book. The source materials in the collage range from some roughly contemporary with the book's initial publication, up to images apparently printed between the 1930s and '60s. The illustrations respond to the texts and enter into conversation with them, and often take the form of tableaux-headers and decorations framing the titles, recalling Nanteuil's Romanticist illuminations.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Théophile Gautier, La Comédie de la mort (The Comedy of Death). 1838. Pirate Edition. E. Laurent, Brussels.
This small, poorly-printed and irregularly cut paperback was printed the year of the first edition, and is probably a pirate edition. Belgium was notoriously the centre of francophone pirate publishing throughout the 19th Century. Three years after this volume was printed, in the archive's 1841 issue of Les Guêpes (see "Journals"), Gautier's closest friend Nerval reported to Alphonse Karr concerning pirate editions of that magazine being openly marketed in Belgium.
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Théophile Gautier, Mlle. de Maupin. 1854. Charpentier, Paris. First Edition was 1835.
Gautier's first full-length novel, a complex text addressing issues of gender (largely exploring questions posed by his fellow Romanticist George Sand (see below), sensuality, and the erotic through the lens of his conception of a Cult of Art. The Preface to the book (written in 1834, the same year as Gautier's contributions to the Annales Romantiques (see above) argued this theory in comprehensive form, articulating a transition from the utopian politics of the Jeunes-France to the more hermetic model he was to promote for the rest of his life.
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Théophile Gautier, La Capitaine Fracasse. 1864. Second Edition. Charpentier, Paris. Vol. I of 2.
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Théophile Gautier, Romans et Contes (Novels and Tales). 1870. Charpentier, Paris. Sextodecimo, 459 pp. Rebound late 19th/early 20th Century, cover detached. Inscribed by E.W. Huckel, 1908 & C.K. Moses, Dec. 1930 & [???] Lippencott? (effaced), November 1911.
When a previous owner of this copy, E.W. Huckel, bought this used copy, he was currently a student of F.C. Sumichrast in French Literature at Harvard. Sumichrast had
translated the 20-odd volume collected works of Gautier (see below)) 8 years earlier. Huckel annotated his copy and wrote a few short critical appraisals in the open spaces in the book, providing rare evidence of how Gautier was being interpreted and taught by his primary proponent in mainstream English literature (his main avant-garde proponents being the Vorticists).
Huckle served on the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate, then the Harvard Monthly, where he contributed various kinds of writing; Sumichrast even reviewed an essay and a poem by Huckle in the Monthly that very year. Later in life, Huckle served as an aide in the graphic arts division at the National Museum, then was ordained and went on to teach at the Philadelphia divinity school (making him an unlikely reader of Gautier). Late in life he became a member of the Rudyard Kipling society, of all things.
Among other pieces, the book includes an essay in which Gautier describes smoking opium with the Romanticist writer Alphonse Karr (see "Periodicals") and Alphonse Esquiros, novelist, occultist and feminist-socialist activist, who was a member of the Evadamiste group and friend of Eliphas Lévi & Flora Tristan.
Huckle served on the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate, then the Harvard Monthly, where he contributed various kinds of writing; Sumichrast even reviewed an essay and a poem by Huckle in the Monthly that very year. Later in life, Huckle served as an aide in the graphic arts division at the National Museum, then was ordained and went on to teach at the Philadelphia divinity school (making him an unlikely reader of Gautier). Late in life he became a member of the Rudyard Kipling society, of all things.
Among other pieces, the book includes an essay in which Gautier describes smoking opium with the Romanticist writer Alphonse Karr (see "Periodicals") and Alphonse Esquiros, novelist, occultist and feminist-socialist activist, who was a member of the Evadamiste group and friend of Eliphas Lévi & Flora Tristan.
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Théophile Gautier, Les Jeunes-France: romans goguenards (The Jeunes-France: Mocking Novels). 1885. Charpentier, Paris.
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Remy de Gourmont, A Night in the Luxumbourg. 1926. Trans. Arthur Ransome. Modern Library, New York.
Remy de Gourmont was one of the key figures of the 19th Century
avant-garde, who—like Gautier, Borel, Claretie, and others—has been
almost eliminated from anglophone consciousness, for inexplicable
reasons. Gourmont was, along with Mallarmé, the most influential
theorist of the avant-garde of the second half of the 19th Century,
weaving together metaphysics, cutting-edge scientific research, history
and historiography, theology, linguistics, libertinism, aesthetics,
social theory and anthropology into a syncretic atheism that looked
forward to the thought of Batailles, Derrida, and Kristeva. He was the
mentor of Alfred Jarry and many of the other Decadents and Symbolists.
Compiler of the key Decadent anthology The Book of Masks and
publisher of several Symbolist journals, he co-edited with Jarry a
journal dedicated to exploring the relationships of Symbolist painting
to Medieval artwork and iconography. He was an influential novelist,
both in his fictionalised memoirs of the avant-garde and in his large
corpus avant-garde erotica, in which sensuality, metaphysics, and
atheist mysticism weave together. A Night in the Luxumbourg is an iconoclastic Symbolist hybrid of mystical treatise, novel, prose-poem, and sociological critique.
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Remy de Gourmont, A Virgin Heart. 1927. Trans. Aldous Huxley. Modern Library, New York. Original publication was 1907.
Interested in every aspect of sexuality, Gourmont here explores the sensuality of virginity and adolescence. One result of this theme is that the novel was one of the few Decadent texts not subject to censorship laws prohibiting sale on the open market; this edition was printed in large numbers by the respectable Modern Library.
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Remy de Gourmont, Colors; with Two Supplementary Colours by the Translator. 1929. Trans. Frederic Reeves Ashfield. Blue Faun Publications, The Renaissance Series, New York. Clothbound 16-mo. No. 318 of 1,950 copies. w/extra cover & spine labels pasted into back flyleaf by unidentified previous owner. Original French publication was 1908.
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Remy de Gourmont, Colors. 1931. Trans. Isaac Goldberg. Privately Printed by the Panurge Press, New York. No. 927 of 1,000 copies. Tooled Hardcover Octavo. Original French publication was 1908.
For the last decades of his life, Gourmont was afflicted with a disfiguring skin disease and lived a hermetic life, rarely seeing anyone but his life-long lover, the avant-garde occultist Berthe Courrière. He produced a large and varied corpus of some of the most intellectually complex, metaphysically infused, textually dense erotica ever written. The range of this writing was great—from stories of incubi, succubi, and sensual ghosts and angels in the tradition of Gautier, to closely observed psychological descriptions of passing flirtations; from linguistically impenetrable prose-poems to simple and sympathetic slices of life; from sado-masochistic Satanism to subtle explorations of virginity. Colors collects a series of his less hallucinatory erotic short stories, each indirectly spun off from an association based in Symbolist theories of colour, perception, and psychology. Like most of Gourmont’s work translated in the years after his death, this was subject to strict censorship laws in the US, and was thus printed as a private edition by the underground Panurge Press,—named after Rabelais’ paragon of Libertines (see ‘Influences’). The cover, in bright red hand-tooled leather, is one of which any Decadent and Symbolist would be proud.
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Remy de Gourmont, Epigrams. 1923. trans. Isaac Goldberg. Little Blue Book No. 444. Haldeman-Julius Company, Girard K.
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Emmanuel Gonzalés, Les Caravans de Scaramouche: fuivies de Giangurgolo & de maitre Ragueneau. Preface by Paul Lacroix (Bibliophile Jacob), Illust. by Henry Guérard. 1881. First Edition. E. Dentu, Paris.
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Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins. 1893. 1st Edition. The Cassell Publishing Co., New York.
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Anna Hempstead Branch, The Heart of the Road and Other Poems. 1901. Houghton Mifflin: Boston & New York/Riverside Press: Cambridge. 16-mo hardcover, 120 pp. w/bookplate of William R. Anderson.
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Anna Hempstead Branch, The Shoes That Danced and Other Poems. 1905. Houghton Mifflin: Boston & New York/Riverside Press: Cambridge. 16-mo hardcover, 201 pp. w/bookplate of William R. Anderson.
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Anna Hempstead Branch, Rose of the Wind and Other Poems. 1910. Houghton Mifflin: Boston & New York/Riverside Press: Cambridge. 16-mo hardcover, 229 pp. w/bookplate of William R. Anderson.
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Anna Hempstead Branch, Sonnets From a Lock Box, and Other Poems. 1929. Houghton Mifflin: Boston & New York/Riverside Press: Cambridge. 16-mo hardcover, 126 pp. Inscribed
in Pencil "For my friend [Mabel H. Browning???] & w/label for
Contemporary Arts & Browsing Book House, New York City, roughly
contemporary with printing. w/ extensive, thoughtful marginalia by
previous owner, including scansion marks.
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Thomas Hood, The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood. 1873. James Miller, Publisher, New York.
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Anna Hempstead Branch, Last Poems. ed. Rigely Torrence. 1944. 1st Edition. Farrar & Rinehart: New York. 16-mo hardcover w/original slipcase & plastic sleeve, 78 pp.
Thomas Hood, The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood. 1873. James Miller, Publisher, New York.
Thomas Hood was one of the key representatives of politicised Romanticism after the deaths of Byron and Shelley, with whom he had worked, and among the strongest links between British and French Romanticism in the 1830s and '40s, when politicized currents in both countries were giving increasing attention to satire. Inspired by the French Romanticist satirical journal Charivari, whose core team included several ex-Bouzingos including Celestin Nanteuil (see below), Hood was a co-founder of the British satirical journal Punch (see entries below), subtitled 'The London Charivari'. Conversely, Hood was highly regarded in French avant-garde communities, and his influence is mentioned by Gautier (see above) and others. At the same time, Poe admired Hood as an innovator in lyric verse.
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Victor Hugo, Hernani. 1830. Laurent Frères: Brussels. Softcover 64-mo.
Victor Hugo, Les Contemplations, Vol. I. of 2. 1856. Michel Lévy Frères, Paris. 1st Edition.
The production of Hugo's Hernani,
a play that embodied the officially-proscribed Romanticist movement and
incorporated anti-Monarchist codes, was the result of years of
coordinated political maneuvering by members of the Romanticist
community. Hugo collaborated with young leaders of the underground
Romanticist subculture in Paris, including Gérard de Nerval, Petrus
Borel, Achille Devéria, Célestin Nanteuil, and Hector Berlioz, to turn
the performances into high-profile media sensations by meticulously
planning with them a riot that would ensure that Romanticism grabbed the
imaginations of people throughout France and beyond. Pitched struggles,
often breaking into physical blows, charcterised almost every
performance of the play's first run, and provided the catalyst and
proving-ground from which a radicalised, extremist Romanticism emerged,
calling itself several different names including Frenetic and
Avant-Garde Romanticism.
The 'Battle of Hernani',
as it was known, was both a seminal event in the evolving avant-garde
and a major revolution in mainstream French culture, and official first
editions (as well as second, third, and fourth) are virtually
unobtainable. Not so this Belgian edition of the play, printed within
months of the premier, which indicates the immediate and wide-ranging
impact that the play and the conflicts surrounding it made throughout
Europe. Belgium was the capital of pirate publishing throughout the 19th
Century, and Laurent Frères went on to produce cheap editions of other
Romanticist works, including the pirate edition of Gautier's Comédie de Mort held by the Revenant Archive (see above).
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Victor Hugo, Les Contemplations, Vol. I. of 2. 1856. Michel Lévy Frères, Paris. 1st Edition.
Victor Hugo was a key strategist, inspiration, and the most visible standard-bearer of Romanticism during its take-over of the French cultural infrastructure during the 1830s. By the time of his death half a century later his influence had fundamentally infiltrated every facet of both intellectual and popular culture, an incalculable affect on Western society comparable in the twentieth century only to that of the Beatles. While Hugo developed and epitomised the mainstream Romanticism that the avant-garde in some ways set itself against, Hugo was key in developing a popular perception of creative activity as an ethical and intellectual praxis, which in turn made the activities of underground Romanticism comprehensible; both were born at the 'Battle of Hernani', in which Hugo was the chief strategist and the organisers of the avant-garde the tacticians and fighters; and the personal and ideological bonds between Hugo and the avant-garde community never disappeared. The Contemplations was compiled and assembled during Hugo's twenty-year self-imposed exile in opposition to the regime of Napoleon III; it was published in Paris since the government considered it more dangerous to censor Hugo than to allow his texts to circulate, given his tremendous celebrity. This volume contains poems written between Hernani in 1830 and 1843. Michel Lévy was at this time one of the most visible Romanticist publishers--not least due to his work with Hugo. In this archive, see his editions of George Sand, Théodore de Banville, and Auguste Maquet (below).
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Victor Hugo, Hernani. 1891. Student’s edition w/English Introduction and Notes by John E. Matzke. D.C. Heath’s Modern Language Series, Boston.
In 1830, the first run of Hugo’s Hernani was characterized by near-riots every evening, a success de scandal that forced Romanticism into public consciousness and tipped the cultural scales in its favour. So successful was this coup d’etat that by 1891 the play was fully canonized, and being used for English students learning French. This students’ edition includes an introduction in English discussing the play’s innovations in prosody, and detailed grammatical and vocabulary notes in English.
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Joris-Karl Huysmans, A Rebours (Against the Grain / Against Nature). 1931. Introduction by Havelock Ellis, Illustrations by Arthus Zaidenberg. Illustrated Editions, New York.
A Rebours is, of course, the most well-known and comprehensive portrait of the Decadent community of the 1880s, the epitome of the orientation within the avant-garde begun by Gautier, Nerval, and the Bohême Doyenné/ Assassins' Club groups in the late 1830s and '40s. This edition is not from the 19th Century, but represents a step in the 30+ year struggle for Anglophone avant-gardists to get a complete, uncensored translation published (One translation of an Huysmans prose-poem does appear in Merrill's 1890 Pastels in Prose anthology, see "Anthologies"). This edition, which I have not definitively identified in the bibliographic record, may have been of dubious legality. It is introduced by Havelock Ellis, a psychologist and writer who was one of the first to write extensively and objectively about transgender issues and other transgressive sexual practices, and had a substantial influence on Freud. Interestingly, this beautifully scuffed-up American edition was discovered in the UK by Alan Reed.
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Gabriel-Marie Legouvé, Le Mérite des femmes (The Merit of Women). New Edition, Augmented with Unpublished Poems. (1824). Louis Janet: Paris. Hardcover 32mo.
Matthew 'Monk' Lewis, Romantic Tales. 1809. Volume I of II. First American edition. M. & W. Ward, New York. Full leather Sextodecimo, 344 pp., front cover detatched.
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Pierre Louÿs, Aphrodite: Moeurs antiques. 1896. Illustrated by A. Calbet. Librairie Borel: Paris–Collections Eduard Guillaume "Nymphée". Sextodecimo Hardcover, 394 pp. First Illustrated Edition.
Combining the Romantic Orientalist love of ‘exotic’ cultures, the Parnassian affinity for ancient Mediterranean cultures, and the Decadent interest in sexuality and excess, Pierre Louÿs developed a body of erotic novels which were thoroughly steeped in historical research, which exercised a major influence on (among others) Jarry, especially on Messalina, the latter’s historical novel of ancient Rome. Louÿs was bisexual, and created one of the first extensive bodies of work in France to consistently and positively portray lesbianism; he was an important part of the European homosexual intellectual community, and was the dedicatee of Oscar Wilde's Salomé. His work made a major impact on underground Libertine subculture, and were often translated and published in very small, private editions in order to evade stringent censorship laws in the US and UK in the first half of the 20th Century. The various copies of his novel Aphrodite that are held in the Revenant Archive reflect this history; the book was a best-seller in France, and available only in underground circles in translation, in many different editions of very small runs.
Aphrodite
is the story of a wealthy courtesan in Athens during the beginning of
the dissolution of the Roman empire; her life similarly descends into a
mire of theft, blasphemy, and murder when she sets a series of
impossible demands to an infatuated lover.
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Charles Nodier, Les Sept Chateaux du roi de bohême / Les Quartre talismans. (1852). Illust. Tony Johannot, Napoleon Thomas, et. al. Victor Lecou, Paris. Sextodecimo, 326 pp. Quarter Leather. Original publication was in 1829.Inscribed by 19th Century reader: "J.L."
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The first American edition of this novel seems to have been first published in 1863, so that by the time of this edition Sand's work had passed well into the mainstream, or at least her less socioeconomically challenging work such as this pastoral story. The book seems to have been a family favourite: the inscription reads, "Vol. 2 of the Bryant 'Happy Hours' Library / Uncle Jim" and the back of the book has been scribbled on in pencil, presumably by one of the Bryants though Leaine Gibson owned the book at a later date (signed). The translation is uncredited, as is the single, mediocre and vaguely irrelevant illustration tipped in at page 80.
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Walter Scott, Rob Roy. 1824. J. Crissy, Philadelphia. Hard-bound leather Sextodecimo, 246 pp.
Anaïs Ségalas, Enfantines: Poèsies à ma Fille. n.d. (1844). Janet, Paris. Hard-bound leather Sextodecimo, 245 pp.
Percy Shelley, The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by William Rossetti. 1878. Thomas V. Crowell & Co., New York.
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Eugéne Sue, The Wandering Jew. 1846. Illustrated by Paul Gavarni. Vol. I of II. First American edition. Harper & Brothers, New York. Leather-bound w/detached covers. Octavo, 588 pp.
Algernon Swinburne, A Year's Letters. 1901. Thomas B. Mosher, Portland, Maine. Limited Edition of 450 copies.
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Algernon Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse, and Other Poems. 1909. Eighth Edition. Chatto & Windus, London.
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Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi; ou les polonais (Ubu Imperator: or, The Polish), ed. Jean Saltas. 1922. 12th Printing. Charpentier & Fasquelle: Paris. Softcover Sextodecimo, 191 pp. [1st publication 1896]
Alfred Jarry, the discoverer of 'Pataphysics, was one of the key links between the 19th and 20th Century avant-gardes and a major precursor of Dada and Surrealism; the brutally absurd, violently childlike, anarchic play Ubu Roi was his most scandalous and thus well-known work. The three previous editions are virtually unobtainable; this edition is published by Charpentier, which throughout the 19th Century had published avant-garde works once their authors' reputations had begun to be established (this archive contains many Charpentier books), had recently been bought by Fasquelle, which would go on to serve an analogous function in the 20th Century. The first edition had been small and the second moderate in its run, and the centrality of Dada (which ended the year this book was published) in the francophone avant-garde meant that Jarry was becoming central to the anti-tradition. This edition was printed to satisfy that demand, and is the one that introduced most of the youth who would flock to the banners of Surrealism, the Grand Jeu, the College of Sociology and indeed the College of 'Pataphysics itself. This copy is completely cut, and has been read in its entirety; nothing is known of its original reader.
Antoine Jay, La Conversion d'un romantique, manuscrit de Jacques Delorme [The Conversion of a Romanticist, manuscript of Jacques Delorme]. 1830. First Edition. Moutardier, Librairie-Éditeur: Paris. Hardbound Octavo, 431 pp. Inscribed in Red Pen: [cf]. So. / Paris 8[?] 16 1848" & "A. [O?eg?es?]".
This copy has been well-read but also well cared-for by at least one generation already, and probably at least two; the binding is tight and the pages clean, but the spine and edges are worn from use. The book's first owner has left no discernible trace, but an inscription in red ink, which I can only read in part, records its purchase in Paris during the 1848 revolution. A descriptive note in pencil, written on the back of a scrap of paper torn from an advert for fountain pens, has been tipped in as a bookmark by a subsequent owner, probably in the 1920s.
Frederic Gottlieb Klopstock, The Messiah. 1817. Translated by Frederic Shoberl & Illustrated by J. Cundee? First full English translation. Albion Press/J. and J. Cundee, London. Inscribed with hand-written essay from Catharine Drage[?] to Isaac Fovargue on his deathbed, May 9, 1817.
Alfred Jarry, the discoverer of 'Pataphysics, was one of the key links between the 19th and 20th Century avant-gardes and a major precursor of Dada and Surrealism; the brutally absurd, violently childlike, anarchic play Ubu Roi was his most scandalous and thus well-known work. The three previous editions are virtually unobtainable; this edition is published by Charpentier, which throughout the 19th Century had published avant-garde works once their authors' reputations had begun to be established (this archive contains many Charpentier books), had recently been bought by Fasquelle, which would go on to serve an analogous function in the 20th Century. The first edition had been small and the second moderate in its run, and the centrality of Dada (which ended the year this book was published) in the francophone avant-garde meant that Jarry was becoming central to the anti-tradition. This edition was printed to satisfy that demand, and is the one that introduced most of the youth who would flock to the banners of Surrealism, the Grand Jeu, the College of Sociology and indeed the College of 'Pataphysics itself. This copy is completely cut, and has been read in its entirety; nothing is known of its original reader.
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Antoine Jay, La Conversion d'un romantique, manuscrit de Jacques Delorme [The Conversion of a Romanticist, manuscript of Jacques Delorme]. 1830. First Edition. Moutardier, Librairie-Éditeur: Paris. Hardbound Octavo, 431 pp. Inscribed in Red Pen: [cf]. So. / Paris 8[?] 16 1848" & "A. [O?eg?es?]".
From the early 1820s until the "Battle of Hernani"
in February of 1830, French Romanticist subculture became increasingly
eccentric, militant, and visible to the public eye, at least in Paris.
The resistance of the Classicist mainstream was ramped-up apace, and
found its most forceful expression in this harsh anti-Romanticist satire
by Antoine Jay, which rallied and catalyzed the Classicist opposition.
Like
many on the left in the 1820s and early '30s, Jay was progressive in
political matters but deeply reactionary in linguistic and cultural
matters. This book made him one of the most prominent critics of "The
New Literature" as Romanticism was often called. Two years after its
publication, Jay was elected to the Académie Française, where he
militated against the admission of Victor Hugo in 1841; though Hugo was
admitted, Jay saw his revenge the following year when Classicist
audiences organised riots at the first performances of Hugo's play The Burgaves, spelling the end of the Romanticists' dominance of the popular stage since Hernani premiered within months of this novel.
The
satire claims to have been written by Jacques Delorme, parodic
brother of Saint-Beuve's arch-romanticist nom-de-plume Joseph Delorme.
Jay parodies the "excesses" of the emerging avant-garde's lifestyle
(attacking the Jeunes-France group by name), skewers Romanticist
poetics, insults the movement's leaders and canon, and argues its
literary principles. He spreads rumours about the subculture,
exaggerates them, and invents others. He criticizes their experimental
language, the distortion of grammar in their work, their use of
neologisms, their employment of bizarre and inscrutable figurative
language, even reprinting large passages of Romanticist verse and drama
in order to ridicule it.
The
book thus swiftly entered the Romanticist canon as a favoured target of
invective and ridicule, and probably exercised some reciprocal
influence on the radicalization of the movement's extreme fringes into
the avant-garde, which was accelerating just as the book was published.
It certainly affected the movement's representation of itself to the
public, for the avant-garde Romanticists typically portrayed themselves
in satirical form, as a function of their generally destabalising
project. Gautier's roman-à-clef The Jeunes-France (see above) is, in one
dimension, a parody of Jay's satire, as explicitly signaled in the tale,
"Daniel Jovard; or, the Conversion of a Classicist".
This copy has been well-read but also well cared-for by at least one generation already, and probably at least two; the binding is tight and the pages clean, but the spine and edges are worn from use. The book's first owner has left no discernible trace, but an inscription in red ink, which I can only read in part, records its purchase in Paris during the 1848 revolution. A descriptive note in pencil, written on the back of a scrap of paper torn from an advert for fountain pens, has been tipped in as a bookmark by a subsequent owner, probably in the 1920s.
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Frederic Gottlieb Klopstock, The Messiah. 1817. Translated by Frederic Shoberl & Illustrated by J. Cundee? First full English translation. Albion Press/J. and J. Cundee, London. Inscribed with hand-written essay from Catharine Drage[?] to Isaac Fovargue on his deathbed, May 9, 1817.
Klopstock was credited with reviving the Epic form, often called the 'German Milton' in the early 19th Century. His Messiah
was a key text for European Romanticism generally--he was a major
influence on the Athenäeum group, on Goethe, Schiller, and the Sturm
und Drang, and in particular for the Jeunes-France poets O'Neddy,
Gautier, and Nerval. Cundee, the publisher, was an engraver (presumably
responsible for the etchings illustrating this volume) and an
influential editor of early illustrated and periodicals.
This copy presents a mystery: it seems to have been related in some
way to the alcohol-related death of Isaac Fovargue the year of its
publication, either as a gift to him within a few months of his death,
or as a memorial after it. There are two inscriptions in the same hand:
1.) "1817 / Stonebridge Isaac Fovargue Died on Friday May 9th 1817 at ten minutes before 11 in the morning uncle to the above Catharine [Drage?] aged 49- buried on monday 12th at Thorney Cambridgeshire"
[The facing inscription is an essay/sermon on alcoholism, written first horizontally and then vertically over the already-written text--see photo posted above]
2.) "On Drunkennefs / O that men should put an enemy into their mouth to steal away their brains. All the crimes on earth do not destroy so many of the human race nor alienate so much property as drunkennefs If you wish to be always thirsty be a drunkard for the oftener and more you drink the oftener and more thirsty you will be if you seek to prevent your friends [???]ing you in the world be a drunkard for that will defeat all efforts if you are determined to be utterly destroyed in [estates?] body & soul be a drunkard & you will soon know that it's impofsible to adopt a more effectual means to accomplish your end Drunkenness [expels?] reason--drowns the memory defaces beauty diminishes strength"[here the texts breaks and continues vertically:]
"inflames the blood causes internal external and [incurable?] wounds is a witch to the senses a devil to the soul a [thief?] to the purse the beggars companion the wifes woe and childrens sorrow makes a strong man weak & a wise man a fool he is worse than a beast and is a self murderer who drinks to other mens health and robs himself of his own"Such personal traces and communications of the lives that books have touched are a huge part of what this archive is all about.
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Paul Lacroix (aka Bibliophile Jacob), My Republic. 1936. Trans. Theodore Wesley Koch. The Caxton Club, Chicago. Limited Edition of 300 copies.
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Gabriel-Marie Legouvé, Le Mérite des femmes (The Merit of Women). New Edition, Augmented with Unpublished Poems. (1824). Louis Janet: Paris. Hardcover 32mo.
This
book presents an intriguing little bibliographic riddle: an 1824
reprint of an 1801 feminist tract in verse by Gabriel-Marie Legouvé, it
shares a title–but not text–with an 1816 feminist history by Charles
Malo, who five years later would take over editorship of the Annales Romantiques anthologies, for this
book's publisher. Though the confusion of titles and publishers is
tightly knotted-up, the convergence does make a certain amount of sense
due to the feminist leanings of everybody involved (all men).
Legouvé's
text, his most famous work, advocates greater respect for women and the
reversal of many stereotypes, though it does not touch on concrete
political reform. A respected member of the Académie Française, he went
mad in 1810 after the death of his wife and spent his last few years in
an asylum. His son Ernest carried on much of his project, and published
pioneering studies of female consciousness and pedagogy and a social
history of femininity.
The poem itself (here's the text in a different edition) fills 38 pages arguing against misogyny on moral, maternal, mythological, and historical grounds, followed by 73 pages of explicatory notes, followed by a collection of other poems plus a short story and an essay on love by Legouvé, all also annotated. This copy is quite thoroughly used, its binding peeling away from the boards.
While Janet was not the poem's original publisher, it made sense for him to reprint it, for his press focused at this time on a female audience. It was probably in this connection that Janet published the first edition of Malo's work of the same name in 1816, the year following the reign of Napoleon's militantly misogynist (even by the time's standards) regime. Though Legouvé's poem had inspired a slew of responses and parodies, and Malo's must intentionally echo it, the latter does not seem to be directly derivative.
The original Janet press was run by Pierre-Etienne Janet, but his son Louis began this, his own imprint in 1810, on which this was printed. Although he continued to publish some classicist writers (sometimes even in explicitly Romanticist anthologies!), his sympathies were with the incipient Romantic movement, and the year after this copy was printed, he took over publication of the important Annales Romantiques anthology, collected in this archive. In 1829, he turned over editorship to Charles Malo, tying off our bibliographic knot.
The poem itself (here's the text in a different edition) fills 38 pages arguing against misogyny on moral, maternal, mythological, and historical grounds, followed by 73 pages of explicatory notes, followed by a collection of other poems plus a short story and an essay on love by Legouvé, all also annotated. This copy is quite thoroughly used, its binding peeling away from the boards.
While Janet was not the poem's original publisher, it made sense for him to reprint it, for his press focused at this time on a female audience. It was probably in this connection that Janet published the first edition of Malo's work of the same name in 1816, the year following the reign of Napoleon's militantly misogynist (even by the time's standards) regime. Though Legouvé's poem had inspired a slew of responses and parodies, and Malo's must intentionally echo it, the latter does not seem to be directly derivative.
The original Janet press was run by Pierre-Etienne Janet, but his son Louis began this, his own imprint in 1810, on which this was printed. Although he continued to publish some classicist writers (sometimes even in explicitly Romanticist anthologies!), his sympathies were with the incipient Romantic movement, and the year after this copy was printed, he took over publication of the important Annales Romantiques anthology, collected in this archive. In 1829, he turned over editorship to Charles Malo, tying off our bibliographic knot.
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Matthew 'Monk' Lewis, Romantic Tales. 1809. Volume I of II. First American edition. M. & W. Ward, New York. Full leather Sextodecimo, 344 pp., front cover detatched.
Matthew Lewis, along with Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole see below), was instrumental in the codification of the literary Gothic genre, and exerted a huge influence over both vernacular horror, Frenetic Romanticism, and the avant-garde well into the 20th Century. (see Russell's setting of his poem in "Music".) His masterpiece The Monk gave him his nickname; this volume includes several long gothic-romantic tales and novellas. This copy has been quite well-loved.
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Pierre Louÿs, Aphrodite: Moeurs antiques. 1896. Illustrated by A. Calbet. Librairie Borel: Paris–Collections Eduard Guillaume "Nymphée". Sextodecimo Hardcover, 394 pp. First Illustrated Edition.
Combining the Romantic Orientalist love of ‘exotic’ cultures, the Parnassian affinity for ancient Mediterranean cultures, and the Decadent interest in sexuality and excess, Pierre Louÿs developed a body of erotic novels which were thoroughly steeped in historical research, which exercised a major influence on (among others) Jarry, especially on Messalina, the latter’s historical novel of ancient Rome. Louÿs was bisexual, and created one of the first extensive bodies of work in France to consistently and positively portray lesbianism; he was an important part of the European homosexual intellectual community, and was the dedicatee of Oscar Wilde's Salomé. His work made a major impact on underground Libertine subculture, and were often translated and published in very small, private editions in order to evade stringent censorship laws in the US and UK in the first half of the 20th Century. The various copies of his novel Aphrodite that are held in the Revenant Archive reflect this history; the book was a best-seller in France, and available only in underground circles in translation, in many different editions of very small runs.
This edition was issued from the Librairie Borel, which specialized in illustrated editions of Decadent and Symbolist erotica, the same year that the true first edition was published by the Symbolist organ Mercure de France. It is illustrated by Antoine Calbet, an Impressionist-inflected painter who specialized in lightly salacious nude women.
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Pierre Louÿs, Aphrodite: Ancient Manners. 1929. Anonymous Translator. Anonymous Publisher, New York. Private Edition of 1,000 copies; unnumbered.
Like many Decadent works translated during the 1920s-40s, numerous different translations and editions of Aphrodite were privately printed in order to circumvent censorship laws; in this case, the translator and publisher also remained anonymous, and appended a preface justifying the author’s presentation of sexual codes in the historical past.
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Pierre Louÿs, Aphrodite. 1946. Anonymous Translator. Avon, New York.
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Pierre Louÿs, Psyche. 1931. Anonymous Translator. Conclusion & Notes by Claude Farrère. New York: Covici, Friede. Cloth-bound Hardcover Octavo. Original publication was 1927.
Psyche was not published until two years after Louÿs' death; he worked on it for nearly two decades, and his friend, the orientalist writer Claude Ferrère, who wrote the introduction to this volume, calls it his most personal book; until his death, Louÿs hesitated to publish it, arguing that 'The book is too intimate'. In it he departs from his usual historical setting, and describes an amorous Dandy torn between two forms of love, as incarnated in two very different lovers.
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Pierre Louÿs, Aphrodite. 1946. Anonymous Translator. Avon, New York.
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Pierre Louÿs, Collected Works. 1951. Shakespeare House: New York. Hardcover clothbound Sextodecimo, 628 pp.
This collection, published in 1951, represents a
loosening of these regulations, and his transition from a notorious
underground force in English literature to a respectable but seldom-read
footnote to academic history.
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Auguste Maquet (aka Augustus MacKeat), Dettes de Coeur (Debts of the Heart). 1862. La Librairie Nouvelle, Michel-Lévy, Paris. First publication was 1857.
A member of the Jeunes-France / Bouzingo group, where he was known as
Augustus MacKeat, Maquet became Alexandre Dumas pére's principle
collaborator/ghost writer for several decades, substantially writing
many of the most popular novels attributed to Dumas, including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo,
though his name was suppressed to protect Dumas' celebrity and
Brand-name. The relationship eventually broke down and Maquet sued Dumas
successfully. Paul Lacroix/Bibliophile Jacob (see "Books") was also
among the many underground novelists who wrote anonymously for the Dumas
'brand'. This novel was published under Maquet's own name; his
publisher, Michel Levy, had put out the 1851 edition of Sand's La mare au diable
(see below) as part of this same series in conjunction with the
Romanticist publisher Hetzel; several years later Levy would begin
publishing Baudelaire's translations of Edgar Poe.
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Auguste Maquet (aka Augustus MacKeat), La Maison du Baigneur: Drame en
cinq actes. (The Bath-house: Drama in Five Acts). 1864. La Librairie Nouvelle, Michel-Lévy, Paris.
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Auguste Maquet (aka Augustus MacKeat) & Alexandre Dumas, The Black Tulip. 1932. Walter J. Black: New York. First published in 1850. Copy owned by the poet Edward Lense.
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Catulle Mendès, Le Chercheur de tares: roman contemporain (The Seeker of Flaws: Contemporary Novel). 1898. Bibliothèque Charpentier, Paris. Inscribed by the author to the Symbolist musician Mme. Jean Richepin.
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Monte-Naken, Rimes futiles (Futile Rhymes). 1879. Librairie des Bibliophiles, Paris.
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Alfred de Musset, La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (Confession of a Child of the Century). 1867. Charpentier, Paris. Inscribed: Auguste [???]
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Charles Nodier, Trilby, ou Le Lutin d'argail: Nouvelle Écossoise [sic]. (Trilby, or The Argyle Sprite: New Scot) 1822. Second Edition. Chez Ladvocat, Paris. Hard-bound cardboard Sextodecimo, 102 pp.
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Charles Nodier, Les Sept Chateaux du roi de bohême / Les Quartre talismans. (1852). Illust. Tony Johannot, Napoleon Thomas, et. al. Victor Lecou, Paris. Sextodecimo, 326 pp. Quarter Leather. Original publication was in 1829.Inscribed by 19th Century reader: "J.L."
Charles Nodier exercised a tremendous influence on the first generation
of the avant-garde in his myriad capacities as Frenetic novelist,
organiser, archivist, critic, bibliographer, theorist, and
linguist--indeed, the 'Petit-Cénacle' group, later renamed the Bouzingo,
took their first moniker in tribute to Nodier's own 'Cénacle' salons,
to which they were regular guests when this volume was published in
1829. At the time, Histoire du roi de bohême was considered his
most radical book, and was recognised as a seminal influence on
avant-garde Romanticist typography, book design, illustration, and
narrative technique.
Steeped in
Rabelais, Sterne, Peacock, etc., the story is wildly experimental and
formally fractured, with sections written in dialogue, as
advertisements, as lists, as as fake publishers' notes, and spinning off
into chapter-long diversions into etymology, obscure history and other
apparently tangential subjects. The typography, formatting, and integration
of text and illustration are startlingly playful, and display the seeds
of Apollinaire's calligrammes
and other visual writing as the typography begins to intrude upon,
mimic, and dissolve the semantic coherence of the narration.
The
illustrations and decorations are by Tony Johannot, who remained one of
the most important illustrators of underground Romanticism, a close
friend of Célestin Nantueil, and a pioneer of French political
cartooning.
One chapter comprises an extremely early
example of a phonetic poem--90 years before Morgenstern's and
Marinetti's experiments with the form.
Also included in this volume is Nodier's 30-page essay 'Du Fantastique en littérature' (On the Fantastic in Literature), which provided much of the theoretical underpinning for Frenetic Romanticism, and four 'fantastic' stories first published in 1838, including some illustrations by the obscure Bouzingo artist Napoleon Thomas, which (to my knowledge) have gone uncredited for over a century and a half.
Also included in this volume is Nodier's 30-page essay 'Du Fantastique en littérature' (On the Fantastic in Literature), which provided much of the theoretical underpinning for Frenetic Romanticism, and four 'fantastic' stories first published in 1838, including some illustrations by the obscure Bouzingo artist Napoleon Thomas, which (to my knowledge) have gone uncredited for over a century and a half.
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Charles Nodier, L'Amour et le Grimoire & Les Marionettes. Undated, c. 1945-55. Les Meilleurs Livres Series, No. 288. Arthème Fayard: Paris. Paperback 16-mo, 62 pp.
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Philothée O'Neddy (aka Théophile Dondey) & Ernest Havet, Feu et flamme; publié avec une introduction et... la correspondance inédite de Théophile Dondey et d'Ernest Havet (Fire and Flame; published with an introduction and... unpublished correspondence of Théophile Dondey and Ernest Havet. 1926. Ed. Marcel Hervier. Bibliothèque Romantique: Éditions des Presses Français & Société d'Édition "Les Belles-lettres", Paris.
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Philothée O'Neddy (aka Théophile Dondey), Poésies posthumes. 1877. First Edition. Charpentier, Paris. Softcover Sextodecimo, 496 pp.
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Robert Dale Owen, Beyond the Breakers: A Story of the Present Day. 1870. Lippincott: Philadelphia. Cloth-bound Hardcover Octavo, 274 pp. Inscribed by the Author to Albert G. Browne.
Robert
Dale Owen was the son of the Welsh utopian socialist Robert Owen, and
helped his father to establish the utopian industrial experiment at New
Harmony, Indiana in 1825, running its day-to-day operations. After the
experiment dissolved, he edited various Socialist newspapers, advocated
public education, and was active in Abolitionist, Feminist, and
Spiritualist networks. His activism led to politics, and he served in
the House of Representatives for Indiana, helped found the Smithsonian,
and during the Civil War worked in the predecessor of the Freedman's
Bureau.
This quite deteriorated copy of Owen's novel Beyond the Breakers is inscribed by Owen: "Presented
to / Mr. & Mrs. Albert G. Browne, / By their friend / the Author. /
March, 1870." Browne, who had been the U.S. Treasury Department's
representative in the occupied Carolinas during the Civil War (here's a link to the archive of his papers), later
donated book to Order of the Portal, Dowling Building, Malden
Massachusetts, according to the stamp; I have found no other trace of
this organisation.
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Joseph Péladan, Les amants de pise (The Lovers of Pisa). Undated, c. 1917. Nelson, Paris.
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Misha Persall, About the Hour-Glass and the Scythe. 1939. Sole Edition. Maverick Press: Woodstock, New York. Flocked Softcover 16-mo, 94 pp.
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Jacques Plowert [Paul Adam], Petit glossaire pour servir a l'intelligence des auteurs décadents et symbolistes. (Little Glossary to Aid the Comprehension of Decadent and Symbolist Authors). Oct., 1888. First Edition. Vanier, Bibliopole: Paris. With marginalia by unknown avant-gardist.
Raymond Queneau, Une Histoire modèle. (A Model History) 1966. First Edition, Limited Run [unnumbered] of 72. Gallimard, Paris. Inscribed, probably by Queneau, ‘to Herb who knows mathematics is the best language can do.’
As with every generation of the avant-garde, the Decadent and Symbolist movements systematically developed ways to de-familiarize and radicalize the use of language, and their work was thus under constant attack as incomprehensible, absurd, esoteric, and degenerate. The designations "Decadent" and "Symbolist" were themselves contested, typically applied to overlapping networks of the same community, and often used synonymously both by proponants and detractors. This satirical dictonary of avant-garde slang (argot), neologisms, anti-conventional usage, and theoretical vocabulary is a tongue-in-cheek but accurate snapshot of linguistic experimentation and communal argot within the avant-garde at the time, offering examples of each word from recent Decadent texts.
This rare volume was issued by the ultra-Symbolist publisher Léon Vanier, and represents a group of avant-garde poets and theorists who were promoting self-declared Decadence and Symbolism; indeed, Vanier's publishing house called itself a 'Bibliopole'--a bit of Symbolist argot which does not appear in the dictionary but is defined in the Glossaire itself, thus (roughly translated): "Bibliopole: Seller of books. Greek, Bibliopôlès. ex. "Léon Vanier, bibliopole of Symbolists and Decadents." (Posters.)" The list of Vanier publications on the back maps out a network of young radical polemicists of Symbolism including Paul Adam and Francis Viele-Griffin (editors of the leftist Symbolist journal Entretiens), J.K. Huysmans (author of À Rebours, the 'Breviary of Decadence'), Jean Moreas and Gustave Kahn (editors with Adam of the journal Le Symboliste), the francophone American anarchist symbolist poet Stuart Merrill, and, interestingly, the earlier satire of Decadent poetry, Les Deliquescences. The latter, intended as a parodic attack on the Symbolists but then adopted by them (much like Janin's The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman against the Frenetics several generations earlier), was attributed to the pseudonym Adoré Floupette; on the back of this volume, the true authors--Henri Beauclair and Gabriel Vicaire--are listed along with Floupette. The Glossaire, too, was published pseudonymously by "Jacques Plowert", and is usually attributed to Paul Adam.
This particular copy opens up further possible complications and corellations between these two Decadent satires. It contains marginalia in pencil by an unknown 19th Century reader.
Most of this marginalia consists in annotations beside certain entries (predominantly examples drawn from Gustave Kahn & Mallarmé) giving a number and a single word. These would seem to refer to page numbers in the volumes in question--presumably in whatever edition of each work was in the previous reader's possession; but so far I have been unsuccessful in locating the noted words, or the quoted passages, on the indicated pages of the editions online, or matching them with titles of poems, etc. by the authors in question. Clearly, in any case, the reader was deeply involved in avant-garde literature and was actively using the glossary in his or her own poetic, critical, and/or bibliographic process; it is quite possible that they personally knew some of the writers and/or editors represented.
On the title page, the owner has made an intriguing and enigmatic addition: directly below the pseudonym "Jacques Plowert," they have penciled in the names of four poets, enclosed together in parentheses: Felix Féneon, the virulent Decadent anarchist; Jean Moréas, outspoken polemicist of Decadence; Paul Adam, the known actual writer of the Glossaire; and Henri Beauclair, co-author of the satirical Déliquescences. Is it possible that this book's owner, privy to information unpublished but known within the Decadent community, is informing us that the pseudonym "Plowert" in fact covers a collaborative effort by four writers? In this connection Beauclair's collaboration is interesting, since he seems never to have been sympathetic to the movement's aims but, through his parody published by the same Decadent press, was a clear influence on the Glossaire. Or is there some other connection to which the previous reader was attempting to point us? In any event we know that all four had already been published by Vanier, that all but Beauclair are frequently quoted in the Glossaire itself, and that all three were outspoken proponants of Decadence.
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Raymond Queneau, Une Histoire modèle. (A Model History) 1966. First Edition, Limited Run [unnumbered] of 72. Gallimard, Paris. Inscribed, probably by Queneau, ‘to Herb who knows mathematics is the best language can do.’
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Paschal Beverly Randolph, Ravalette: The Rosicrucian's Story. 1939. Prologue, Notes & Epilogue by R. Swinburne Clymer. Issued by authority of the Brotherhood, Order, Temple, and Fraternity of Rosicrucians. Philosophical Publishing Company: Quakertown, Pennsylvania.
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Maurice Rollinat, Les Néuroses. 1923. Bibliothèque Charpentier, Paris.
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George
Sand, Fanchon (Cricket). 1896. Anonymously translated &
illustrated. Henry Altemus, Philadelphia.
The first American edition of this novel seems to have been first published in 1863, so that by the time of this edition Sand's work had passed well into the mainstream, or at least her less socioeconomically challenging work such as this pastoral story. The book seems to have been a family favourite: the inscription reads, "Vol. 2 of the Bryant 'Happy Hours' Library / Uncle Jim" and the back of the book has been scribbled on in pencil, presumably by one of the Bryants though Leaine Gibson owned the book at a later date (signed). The translation is uncredited, as is the single, mediocre and vaguely irrelevant illustration tipped in at page 80.
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George Sand, La mare au diable. (The Pond of the Devil) 1851. J. Hetzel & Michel Levy, Paris.
Outside the avant-garde community, George Sand was one of the most
notorious avant-gardists of the mid-19th Century, and within it was one
of the most divisive. Her cross-dressing, her unabashed sexuality, her
ambiguous relationship with nascent Feminism, and her outspoken
socialist propaganda novels made her a catalyst for the exploration of
gender and its malleability within the Romanticist avant-garde, analogous
in many ways to that of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in the Dada
community. The first edition of this novel had come out in 1846, two
years before the overthrow of the July Monarchy and the establishment of
the Second Republic; this edition, issued jointly by Michel Levy and
the long-time Romanticist publisher Jules Hetzel, then serving in a
cabinet position in the Republican government. Within a year, Napoleon
III had staged a coup-d'etat and Hetzel went into exile in Belgium,
where he published subversive literature and smuggled it into France.
Levy would publish Maquet's Dettes de Ceours (above) six year after this
book.
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Marcel Schwob, The Book of Monelle. trans. William Brown Meloney V, Preface by John Erskine. 1929. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis. Cloth-bound Hardcover Octavo, 181 pp.
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Walter Scott, Rob Roy. 1824. J. Crissy, Philadelphia. Hard-bound leather Sextodecimo, 246 pp.
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Anaïs Ségalas, Enfantines: Poèsies à ma Fille. n.d. (1844). Janet, Paris. Hard-bound leather Sextodecimo, 245 pp.
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Percy Shelley, The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by William Rossetti. 1878. Thomas V. Crowell & Co., New York.
Shelley strove harder than perhaps any of the English Romantics to establish a theoretical and practical framework for radical, politically committed forms of creative praxis. The results are ambivalent--areas of his life typified by great courage, penetration, and integrity, butted up against gaping blind-spots and insensitivities which could destroy those around him. The volatile nature of his work, and his virtual exile after assassination attempts and trailing by Government agents following his involvement in labour organising in Welsh mining towns, made him almost unknown during his lifetime, aside from his successful Gothic drama The Cenci, later produced by Antonin Artaud's Alfred Jarry Theatre. Within a decade of his death, he had been canonised as one of England's Great Poets in the mainstream canon (alongside Wordsworth and Coleridge, who he had publically denounced on multiple occasions for their political apostasy and conversion to Monarchism), whilst the political orientation of his entire career was eradicated from the image, and the work, presented to the public. It is doubly tragic that this, one of the first great efforts of Recouperation taken on by Capitalist historiography, was carried out by his comrades; despite her own radicalism, his wife Mary initiated the de-politicisation of his legacy whilst the specto-avant Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who idolised him, cemented this sanitizing effort--and whose principle organiser, William Rossetti, edited this edition.
Laurence Sterne, Works, in One Volume; with A Life of the Author, written by himself. 1834. Grigg & Elliot: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Signed "E.G. Munn" twice in front in pen, w/small cartoon of be-wigged man in pencil; signed "Chrs EG. Munn" in back.
In the book, Sterne repeatedly related his literary project to that of Rabelais in French and that of Cervantes (another foundational influence on French Romanticism), and the French took to the book naturally. Sterne was one of the most deeply influential forces on French Romanticism in general, and within avant-garde Romanticism especially.
This American copy belonged to Carles E.G. Munn; nothing else is known of Munn, except that he sketched a little cartoon of a be-wigged gentleman on the inside cover (faintly visible in upper left in the photo above)––a style only a generation or two out of date at the time.
Originally published in 1759, Tristram Shandy
established a tradition of formal and narrative experimentation in
fiction that continues in all aspects of anglophone avant-garde writing,
and still remains arguably one of the most unpredictable (and yet
consummately predictable) novels in the English language. It was also
immediately and wildly popular, and has thus exercised a huge influence
on British Comedy, its influence pervasive in the alternative comedic
tradition of the Goons, Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python's Flying Circus,
The Young Ones, Fry & Laurie, et. al.
In the book, Sterne repeatedly related his literary project to that of Rabelais in French and that of Cervantes (another foundational influence on French Romanticism), and the French took to the book naturally. Sterne was one of the most deeply influential forces on French Romanticism in general, and within avant-garde Romanticism especially.
This American copy belonged to Carles E.G. Munn; nothing else is known of Munn, except that he sketched a little cartoon of a be-wigged gentleman on the inside cover (faintly visible in upper left in the photo above)––a style only a generation or two out of date at the time.
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Emily Vielè Strother, Eve Dorre: The Story of Her Precarious Youth. 1915. E.P. Dutton & Company: New York. Hardbound sextodecimo, 256 pp.
Emily Vielè Strother, Eve Dorre: The Story of Her Precarious Youth. 1915. E.P. Dutton & Company: New York. Hardbound sextodecimo, 256 pp.
This
autobiographical novel by the sister of Francis Vielè-Griffin portrays a
fictionalised version of him during his youthful transition from his
Virginia-based military family to the Parisian symbolist avant-garde.
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Eugéne Sue, The Wandering Jew. 1846. Illustrated by Paul Gavarni. Vol. I of II. First American edition. Harper & Brothers, New York. Leather-bound w/detached covers. Octavo, 588 pp.
Eugéne Sue was, along with Hugo and Dumas, one of the principle exponents of populist Romanticism. His hugely popular novels, printed in serial in popular newspapers, weave together the Gothic, Frenetic Romanticism, melodrama, crime dramas, and mystery into sprawling plots with an anti-clerical and liberal-socialist underpinning. His novel Lautréaumont gave its name (minus one letter) to the pseudonym of the writer of The Songs of Maldoror, which took Frenetic Romanticism all the way past its logical conclusion. The Wandering Jew uses a central motif deeply embedded in the Gothic, but spins around it an attack on the Jesuits, religious control, and the exploitation of the working class--complete with footnotes and statistical citations. The illustrations are by the Romanticist satirist Paul Gavarni (see "Lithographs"); they are credited only to "the most eminent artists of Paris"--probably because the American publisher--who 57 years later would publish Chambers' Maids of Paradise (see above) did not have the reproduction rights to Gavarni's illustrations for the 1st French edition the previous year. Somebody literally loved this copy to pieces.
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Algernon Swinburne, A Year's Letters. 1901. Thomas B. Mosher, Portland, Maine. Limited Edition of 450 copies.
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Algernon Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse, and Other Poems. 1909. Eighth Edition. Chatto & Windus, London.
Éduard Turquety, Primavera. 1854. Second Edition. J.-B. Tarride, Brussels.
During the years preceding the Battle of Hernani, Turquety seems to have been associated with the Liberal Romanticist group centred on the journal The Globe, while his work was also championed by Charles Nodier (see above), who would soon merge with them to reconcile Romanticism’s political divide. In 1829 he appeared in the current volume of Charle's Malo's anthology Annales Romantiques (see "Anthologies"). His first collection of poems was published that year, and re-published in 1841 in an expanded version as Primavera, of which this is an 1854 Belgian edition. Inspired by Lamartine, Turquety was part of a collective effort to develop a version of Christianity that would espouse Liberalism and social progress, and became a friend and ally of the progressive priest Lamennais (see "Theory and Praxis" tab), who was eventually defrocked for his support of democratic values. Little is known of Turquety. The back of this little paperback (repaired sometime since publication with a new spine) lists other works put out by the publisher, including many of the early, underground Romanticists who had appeared in the Annales Romantiques.
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Voltaire, L'Henriade: poëme épique. 1819. Imprimérie de Fermin Didot: Paris. Unbound. Folio. w/handwritten inscription by publisher/editor/typographer Firmin Didot.
Oscar Wilde Salome. 1945. Trans. Alfred Douglas, illustrated by Valenti Angelo. Heritage Press, New York.
The
influence of Voltaire on progressive thought is obvious, and his
literary influence on the French Romanticists was also very great, even
when they were often often ambivalent about his rationalism. The
Henriade is one of his two epic poems, championing religious toleration
and civic unity. The more particular reason for the inclusion of this
tome however is the fact that is inscribed by the publisher Firmin
Didot, who was one of the founders (excuse the typesetting pun) of
French Romanticist typography and largely responsible for the
introduction of typographic play into the tradition of avant-garde
literature. He came from a long line of bookmakers who manufactured the
paper, moveable type, and presses used in their books. Along with
Giambattista Bodoni, he pioneered the use of most extreme contrasts of
thick and thin letter-strokes in moveable type in imitation of
hand-penned lettering and increased the importance of serifs to the
letter-form, creating what is now known as the Didot family of typefaces
in his honour.
He pushed the intermixture of typefaces on a single page in frontispieces, title-pages, and chapter headings. This mixture of typefaces, as well as their interaction with etched images, was made more financially feasible by his development of the stereotype printing method, whereby after setting, an entire page would be cast as a single plate of metal for the printing of commercial copies, rendering the printing process much cheaper and allowing him to produce and sell huge numbers of inexpensive, well-printed books, making them available to people with smaller incomes.
Like many printers at the time, he was also a publisher (though his print-shop also filled orders for other houses) and, as the scholarly nature of this edition demonstrates, a very careful editor.
This unbound copy was specially prepared by Didot and sent in raw sewn signatures straight from the shop to a friend, who never added a binding; whether intentionally or not, this unbound state, which displays the construction of the book and emphasizes the raw materials of the bookmaker's craft, is peculiarly appropriate for a gift from a printer whose innovations helped to revolutionize the book trade.
The recipient "Monsieur de Souza", apparently a colleague and friend of Didot's, has not been identified. The inscription reads:
"hommage offert à Monsieur de Souza par son reconnaissant / et respecteux ami / firmin Didot"
He pushed the intermixture of typefaces on a single page in frontispieces, title-pages, and chapter headings. This mixture of typefaces, as well as their interaction with etched images, was made more financially feasible by his development of the stereotype printing method, whereby after setting, an entire page would be cast as a single plate of metal for the printing of commercial copies, rendering the printing process much cheaper and allowing him to produce and sell huge numbers of inexpensive, well-printed books, making them available to people with smaller incomes.
Like many printers at the time, he was also a publisher (though his print-shop also filled orders for other houses) and, as the scholarly nature of this edition demonstrates, a very careful editor.
This unbound copy was specially prepared by Didot and sent in raw sewn signatures straight from the shop to a friend, who never added a binding; whether intentionally or not, this unbound state, which displays the construction of the book and emphasizes the raw materials of the bookmaker's craft, is peculiarly appropriate for a gift from a printer whose innovations helped to revolutionize the book trade.
The recipient "Monsieur de Souza", apparently a colleague and friend of Didot's, has not been identified. The inscription reads:
"hommage offert à Monsieur de Souza par son reconnaissant / et respecteux ami / firmin Didot"
In translation:
"homage offered to Mr. de Souza by his grateful / and respectful friend / firmin Didot"
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Oscar Wilde Salome. 1945. Trans. Alfred Douglas, illustrated by Valenti Angelo. Heritage Press, New York.
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