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The Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations: A Comparative Research Based on a Study of the Ancient Mexican Religious, Sociological and Calendrical Systems
Read MoreZelia Nuttall
Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, 1901.Presentation copy from one of the great women of science to her mother, inscribed on the front free endpaper: “To my dear Mother from her loving daughter. Zelia. April 1901.” Subsequently rebound in Florence at her mother’s instruction and returned to Nuttall after her mother’s death, with a second autograph note in her hand: “My dear mother had this copy bound in Florence, and it came to me after her death. Z. Nuttall.” Also with Zelia Nuttall’s engraved bookplate to the verso of the front free endpaper. Zelia’s mother, Magdalena Parrott Nuttall, gave her a copy of Lord Kingsborough’s Antiquities of Mexico in childhood, a gift frequently cited as the origin of her lifelong engagement with pre-Columbian Mexico. The Fundamental Principles was Nuttall’s most substantial comparative study, arguing cultural parallels between ancient Mediterranean and Mesoamerican civilisations and advancing the controversial hypothesis of transoceanic contact, including possible Phoenician influence. The Florentine binding carries a further association: while working in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence in 1890, Nuttall identified the manuscript later published as The Book of the Life of the Ancient Mexicans, her edition and study of the Codex Magliabecchiano. A singular association copy, the author’s presentation to the mother who set her on her scholarly path, in a binding from the city where she made one of her most important manuscript discoveries.
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Cloches de Noel et de Paques
AU$60,000.00 Read MoreAdd to cartEmile Gebhart; Alphonse Mucha
Paris: F. Champenois & H. Piazza et Cie, 1900.Copy No. 1 of 10 on Japon containing an original Mucha drawing. Emile Gebhart’s three medieval tales: Les trois rois, La derniere nuit de Judas, and Alleluia! presented in one of the great illustrated books of the Art Nouveau period. Alphonse Mucha provided the complete decorative programme: cover design, title-page decoration, limitation page, colophon, and 78 individual headpiece compositions with elaborate floral borders enclosing the text, each hand-coloured by au pochoir. This copy, No. 1, contains an original full-page mixed-media drawing in pencil and watercolour on Japon, signed ‘Mucha’ at lower right, depicting a young woman in flowing drapery and broad knotted sash, her hair loose to her waist beneath a patterned headband, in profile with her hands raised to her collarbone, a detailed study for the main figure featured in the vignette on page 69. Also bound in are a complete suite in colour on Japon of the 78 borders and vignettes and the three designs for the title, limitation, and colophon, together with a second state in black on China paper. The original wrappers and prospectus are retained. The prospectus established a hierarchy of 252 copies in five categories, of which the ten copies on Japon with original watercolours (priced at 550 francs each) ranked only below the unique parchment and satin copies (priced at 1,000 and 800 francs), both entirely reworked by the artist, and above 25 further copies on Japon without watercolour and 215 copies on velin de Rives. The prospectus also noted explicitly that trade discount on the watercolour copies excluded “the cost of the watercolour executed by the artist”, formally distinguishing the value of the Mucha original from that of the book at the point of publication. Provenance: Acquired in 1947 by Albert Quesnot (1882-1954), first violinist with the Paris Opera, thence by descent, retained in the family home until 2026, when acquired at auction in Paris. Fresh to the market after nearly eighty years of unbroken family ownership.
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The Legman Book of Sex
AU$4,500.00 Read MoreAdd to cartGeorge Rhoads
: George Rhoads, 1954.A unique artist’s book by the American painter and sculptor George Rhoads (1926-2021) as a gift for his friend, the erotologist and folklorist Gershon Legman (1917-1999). The two met in Paris shortly after Rhoads’ arrival there in 1952, bonding over origami. The discipline of mechanical precision inherent in origami arguably foreshadows his later complex audiokinetic ball machine sculptures. Rhoads is known to have sent Legman letters embellished with foldings and comic drawings throughout the 1950s and 1960s (a small number of models survive in the Legman archive at the Origami Art Museum, Colonia del Sacramento), but the present volume is a substantially more ambitious and apparently earlier production, made in the opening years of their friendship, and directed squarely toward Legman’s lifelong scholarly fascination with erotic folklore and bawdy humour. The 58 leaves are each illustrated on the recto with original cartoon drawings. The first sixteen leaves carry two short erotic tales: one of ten leaves concerns the tale of a sex maniac; the second, of six leaves, recounts the adventures of “five little Fuckers and how they blew”; the remaining forty-two leaves illustrated with standalone erotic cartoons. The front cover with a colour illustrated title, the inside lower board signed by Rhoads with a decorative border, the date supplied in Legman’s hand. Of considerable research interest as a primary-source artefact of the Rhoads-Legman friendship, complementing the surviving body of gifted material preserved in the Legman archive at the Origami Art Museum. The erotic content places it at the intersection of Rhoads’ early Paris work and Legman’s lifelong scholarship on erotic folklore and bawdy humour, later culminating in his major study ‘Rationale of the Dirty Joke’ (First Series 1968; Second Series 1975). Provenance: ex the estate of Gershon Legman by descent via Neil Pearson.
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Oz Magazine (Australia) Complete Set w/ Newsletter
Read MoreRichard Neville; Richard Walsh; Martin Sharp
Sydney: Oz Publications Ink, 1963-1970.The foundational Australian edition of Oz, edited by Richard Neville, Richard Walsh, and Martin Sharp and published in Sydney between 1963 and 1969, with the reduced-format fortnightly newsletters continuing into 1970 under Walsh and Dean Letcher. Preceding and inspiring the the better-known London Oz (1967-1973), the Australian edition tackled censorship, homosexuality, police corruption, the White Australia policy, and the Vietnam War, provoking a series of obscenity prosecutions, culminating in a 1964 conviction that was later overturned on appeal. Sharp’s covers and illustrations, ranging from early satirical cartooning to full psychedelic intensity, chart his emergence as one of Australia’s most significant pop artists. Complete in 41 issues of the magazine proper, together with a complete set of the rarely seen newsletters (Nos. 42-82) including the election special (No. 56). A high point of Australian underground publishing.
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Viva Espana: Veinte Aguas Fuertes de Juan Torito
Read MoreJuan Torito
No place: No publisher, No date.20 plates plus an illustrated title plate, each signed and numbered (8 of 69) by the pseudonymous, Juan the Bull, c. 1925. The artist’s identity remains unestablished, with trade speculation favouring a French rather than a Spanish hand. Each plate sexually explicit. Rare in any form, unrecorded in OCLC, only one copy traced at auction, the Hans-Jurgen Dopp copy, that set uncoloured; and all other sighted copies likewise comprise twenty plates including title. The present example thus notable both for hand-colouring and the additional plate.
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Perversite
Read MoreFrancis Carco; Andre Dignimont
Paris: No publisher, 1927.Proto-roman noir of prostitution and exploitation in the slums of Paris. The first illustrated edition of Francis Carco’s novel, originally published unillustrated in 1925. One of 149 numbered copies, this copy an exemplaire de passe, outside the stated limitation, initialled by the author on the colophon and inscribed by him to Pierre Borel on the half-title. With a one-page autograph letter signed from Carco to Borel, dated 19 May 1927, and an original signed watercolour by Dignimont, likewise inscribed to Borel, both bound in. The plates, depicting the Parisian demi-monde central to Carco’s fiction, were printed by La Roseraie. Pierre Borel (pseudonym of Frederic Louis Viborel), journalist, critic, and editor-in-chief of L’Eclaireur de Nice, was the author of studies on Maupassant, Marie Bashkirtseff, and Courbet. In a signed Art Deco binding by A. Bianchi of Nice.
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Le Roman de la Momie
AU$2,000.00 Read MoreAdd to cartTheophile Gautier; Alex. Lunois
Paris: Librairie L. Conquet, 1901.The principal deluxe illustrated edition of Gautier’s 1858 Egyptological romance, centred on the discovery of the mummy of Tahoser and the narrative of her love for a young Hebrew. Illustrated by Alexandre Lunois (1863-1916), who travelled extensively in Egypt and based his compositions on direct observation of ancient architecture, ornament, and costume. One of 50 copies on Japon, issued with a supplementary suite of the illustrations, bound with the original wrappers and prospectus, in a signed, richly tooled Egyptian style binding by Chambolle-Duru.
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Thais
AU$2,000.00 Read MoreAdd to cartAnatole France; Raphael Freida
Paris: A. Plicque & Cie, 1924.One of 700 numbered copies on velin de Rives (from a total edition of 781), in a unique fine binding, signed E. Berthet. The upper board with a large painted and incised panel after one of Freida’s plates, the lower board with a smaller panel after a tailpiece, and the central spine compartment with an additional design by the binder. First published in 1890, after serialisation in the Revue des Deux Mondes (1889), Thais is among France’s best-known contes philosophiques: the story of the Alexandrian courtesan Thais and her conversion by the ascetic monk Paphnuce, whose own spiritual certainty disintegrates in the process. Issued in the year of FranceÂ’s death, this finely illustrated edition is the most desirable of the few books illustrated by Raphael Freida (1877-1942), a pupil of Jean-Paul Laurens. His illustrations emphasise the workÂ’s underlying eroticism, sharpening the tension between ascetic renunciation and sensual desire that defines the narrative.
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The Illegal Relatives
Read MoreFrank Moorhouse
[Sydney]: [Tomato Press for The Author], No date.Circa 1973. Pirated edition of illustrated erotic stories planned as an illegal publication in protest of censorship of the printed word, stemming from a case brought against underground newspaper Thor. The Whitlam government passed legislation that brought an end to the censorship yet the printer of this booklet went ahead with privately selling the publication against Moorehouse’s wishes, though also purported that it was delayed because Moorhouse wanted to edit the stories. A competing story has it that Moorhouse commissioned the printing but could not pay for it, so Tomato Press sold the entire inventory to a Sydney secondhand bookdealer to recoup the loss, but this all be hearsay. Illustrated throughout, some Robert Crumb pirates, but largely original unattributed erotic illustrations by Jenny Coopes and others. CAINS 118.
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A Handbook on Hanging
Read MoreCharles Duff
London: The Cayme Press, 1928.Capital punishment in Britain. Being a short Introduction to the fine art of Execution, and containing much useful information on Neck-Breaking, Throttling, Strangling, Asphyixiation, Decapitation and Electrocution; as well as Data and Wrinkles for Hangmen, an account of the late Mr. Berry’s method of Killing and his working list of Drops; to which is added a Hangman’s Ready Reckoner and certain other items of interest. This copy with the bookplate of Alan Queale by N. S.
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A Conspectus of the Pharmacopoeias of London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, and the United States
AU$400.00 Read MoreAdd to cartG. M. Mowbray
London: J. Angerstein Carfrae, 1847.Formulas and preparations interleaved with manuscript notes and formulas of EJ Merrifield, with his signature dated 1850.
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777 vel Prolegomena Symbolica ad Systemam Sceptico-Mysticae Viae Explicandae, Fundamentum Hieroglyphicum Sanctissimorum Scientiae Summae
Read More[Aleister Crowley]
London and Felling-on-Tyne: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1909.First edition, published anonymously, of Crowley’s systematic tables of Qabalistic correspondences, drawing on the work of Mathers, Allan Bennett, and George Cecil Jones. One of 500 copies. The loosely inserted Tree of Life plate and the detachable subscription form for the Equinox are both present.
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The Tale of Archais: A Romance in Verse
AU$2,000.00 Read MoreAdd to cartA Gentlemen of the University of Cambridge [Aleister Crowley]
London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1898.One of Crowley’s early poetic explorations of erotic transformation, desire, and sacrificial devotion, published pseudonymously before the public assumption of his occult identity. One of 250 copies of the first edition, this example bearing the bookplate of Harry Bertram McCaskie, a physician collector whose plate dates from around the time of publication.
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Scopolamine-Morphine Anaesthesia and A Psychological Study of Twilight Sleep Made by the Giessen Method
AU$500.00 Read MoreAdd to cartBertha Van Hoosen; Elizabeth Ross Shaw
Chicago: The House of Manz, 1915.Van Hoosen (1863-1952), pioneering American surgeon, was the first woman to head a surgical department at a coeducational university and a co-founder of the American Medical Women’s Association in 1915. She was a leading American advocate of scopolamine-morphine anaesthesia in obstetrics, the so-called Twilight Sleep method developed at the University of Freiburg. The technique, which rendered patients semiconscious and eliminated memory of labour pain, became the subject of a national campaign intersecting with first-wave feminist and suffrage-era activism following a widely-read 1914 McClure’s Magazine expose. Van Hoosen’s text, drawing on extensive clinical experience, covers the method’s application in both general surgery and obstetrics, with Shaw contributing a psychological study of patients under the Giessen protocol. Illustrated with a mounted photographic frontispiece and fifteen plates. This copy with a presentation inscription by the author.
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A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle with Some Reflections by the Way
Read MoreFrances E. Willard
New York, Chicago, Toronto: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1895.Willard was 53 when she took up cycling in 1893, framing the endeavour as both a personal discipline and a broader statement on women’s physical independence. The bicycle had become a potent symbol within contemporary women’s reform movements, offering practical mobility and challenging restrictive dress codes and expectations of feminine decorum. Published at the height of the late 19th-century bicycle craze, Willard’s account blends memoir with advocacy, arguing that mastering the wheel was an exercise in self-reliance applicable well beyond the road. A notable contribution to the literature of first-wave feminism and women’s sporting history.
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Deadly Woman Blues: Black Women & Australian Music
Read MoreClinton Walker
Sydney: NewSouth, 2018.Illustrated survey of Black women in Australian music, the first such book of its kind, containing micro-biographies of over 100 artists each accompanied by an original artwork produced by Walker in a style reminiscent of R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country. Withdrawn shortly after publication following backlash from several of the women featured over biographical errors. Most copies were pulped, with only a small number sold before withdrawal. One of the most recent cases of Australian literature suppression. CAINS 171.
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The Emperor Jones; Diff’rent; The Straw
AU$1,500.00 Read MoreAdd to cartEugene G. O’Neill
New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921.First edition, first state binding, in the original pictorial jacket. The Emperor Jones was a watershed in American theatre, one of the first major Broadway productions to feature a Black actor in a leading dramatic role of such prominence, originally performed by Charles S. Gilpin and later by Paul Robeson in a role that helped establish his international stage reputation. A bold expressionist exploration of fear, power, and racial consciousness, the play remains a landmark text in both African-American theatrical history and the development of modern American drama. ATKINSON A 15-I-i.a. Also includes Diff’rent, a two-act study of sexual repression in a New England fishing village, and The Straw, a naturalistic drama drawn from O’Neill’s own experience in a tuberculosis sanatorium.
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Death and the Lover
AU$1,500.00 Read MoreAdd to cartHermann Hesse
New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1932.First edition in English, translated from the German, Narziss Und Goldmund by Geoffrey Dunlop, and later published as Narcissus and Goldmund.
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Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life
AU$2,500.00 Read MoreAdd to cartThomas Wolfe
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929.Wolfe’s debut novel, a landmark autobiographical coming-of-age narrative in American literature. First edition, second state dust jacket. JOHNSTON A2.1.a.
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Haschisch: A Novel
AU$1,000.00 Read MoreAdd to cartThorold King [Charles Gatchell]
New York: Brentano’s, 1888.First published in 1886 under the pseudonym Thorold King, a novel of narcotic experience following a young Englishman who travels to Egypt, becomes addicted to hashish, and experiences vivid hallucinations. Gatchell was known for his interest in and personal experimentation with cannabis indica extract. In an 1889 letter (sold at auction by Alex Autographs, 2012), he provided detailed instructions on smoking the resinous extract, stating that in his book “there are many facts and many actual experiences” and that it was “possible for you to repeat everything there described.” This copy, probably the author’s own, with a manuscript note on the title page reading: “Published originally by A. C. McClurg, who sold 3 editions. Then I turned it over to Brentano’s who published and sold 3 more editions. C.” Various advertisements and promotional materials for the book are glued to the pastedowns and endpapers. Among the relatively few 19th-century novels to treat cannabis, marijuana, and hashish in a broadly positive or experiential light.