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Flagellees: La Flagellation des Femmes dans la Rome Antique
AU$550.00 Read MoreAdd to cartJean de Virgans
Paris: Librairie Franco-Anglaise, 1922.1920s French flagellation novel with illustrations by Gaston Smit signed in the image as both G. Smit and G. Topfer.
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Le Panier aux Ordures suivi de Quelques Chansons, Ejusdem Farine
AU$550.00 Read MoreAdd to cart[Armand Gouffe]
Canton [Bruxelles]: W. Field et Tching-Kong [Gay & Douce], No date.Belgian clandestine publication of the erotic poems of Armand Gouffe. The erotic title vignette depicts a young lady lifting her skirt to a priest in a kitchen. This copy from the collection of erotophile Gershon Legman, with bibliographical notes in his hand and signed by him. Legman’s note reads as follows: “[Bruxelles: Gay & Douce 1875] Enfer 29; BM. PC. 1769. 1st ed. as : Le Panier aux ordures, par Armand Gouffe et autres. [Paris – London: John Camden Hotten, for Lord Houghton, 1865.]. 36 f., lg 8vo. Hand-drawn facsimile by H.J. Bellars, erotic drawings by Ulm. No copy.* 2nd ed. (first typographical): [title as here,] [Libreville, a a la Society pour la propagation des livres de l’Enfer’ [Bruxelles: Jules Gay], 1866. vi, 154 p. smal 8vo. (106 copies.) BM.PC. 31 g. 4; Coll. G.L. 1957 G. Legman.” The asterisk from above reads, at bottom of page, “except that of Pierre Louys, coll. Bottin, Nice, in 1962].” Laid in also is a folded piece of typescript from Legman noting “SOLD to RP02/2016” (that is, Richard Press, from his widow) and then the explanation of the woodcut engraving at title page, “probably by Gilbert,” “showing a priest kneeling before a woman holding up her skirts before a kitchen fireplace to show her cunt.” 151 pp. And with occasional pencil marginalia translations into English (mostly of titles).
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Of Those Alone
AU$1,000.00 Read MoreAdd to cartRobert Hutton
London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1958.The pseudonymous autobiography of Horace Charles Forbes Cheston, published under the name Robert Hutton shortly after the release of the Wolfenden Report. Written at a time when homosexuality was still criminalised and taboo, Of Those Alone offers an unusually candid account of Cheston’s sexual and emotional life. Moving between Paris, California, New York, and the South of France before returning to England, he recounts his affairs, his ill-fated marriage to an American woman, and his descent into alcoholism, concluding with redemption through Alcoholics Anonymous, an organisation he later helped to establish in Britain. One of the earliest openly homosexual autobiographies of the postwar period, it precedes the more widely known works of the 1960s gay liberation era and is quite likely the first memoir of a gay alcoholic writer.
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Les Fleurs du Mal
Read MoreCharles Baudelaire; Armand Rassenfosse; Henri Noulhac
Paris: Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1899.One of 115 numbered copies of the first, and widely considered the best, illustrated edition of The Flowers of Evil, being the chef d’oeuvre of Belgian artist Armand Rassenfosse, with nearly every page of the text illustrated with Symbolist colour etchings and nude women. This copy from the collection of actor and bibliophile Barry Humphries, with his bookplate; bound in a fine binding signed Noulhac 1918, with multi-rule borders and silk doublures framed with inlaid leather strips and flowers at the corners. Illustrated with a portrait frontispiece, throughout with hundreds of colour illustrations and tailpieces, as well as 6 plates and a page of text with tailpiece outside of the text. Bound at the rear is a Juin 1897 Specimen being the leaf of XX La Geante with an alternative tailpiece illustration and the chapter plate for Les Fleurs du Mal, an etched menu cover for a Les Cent Bibliophiles Dinner for Fleurs du Mal, 6 Mai 1901 by Rassenfosse, as well as 17 additional etchings by Evert van Muyden and other artists.
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A New Dictionary of Natural History; or, Compleat Universal Display of Animated Nature. With Accurate Representations of the Most Curious and Beautiful Animals, Elegantly Coloured.
AU$5,000.00 Read MoreAdd to cartWilliam Frederic Martyn
London: Harrison and Co., 1785.Popular 18th century reference work by William Fordyce Mavor under his Martyn pseudonym, with 100 hand-coloured plates each depicting 4 to 9 animals, insects, or shells.
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Theatrum Botanicum: The Theater of Plants. Or, An Herball of Large Extent
Read MoreJohn Parkinson
London: Tho. Cotes, 1640.Containing therein a more ample and exact History and declaration of the Physicall Herbs and Plants that are in other Authours, encreased by the accesse of many hundreds of new, rare, and strange Plants from all the parts of the world, with sundry Gummes and other Physicall materials, than hath beene hitherto published by any before; And a most large demonstration of their Natures and Venues. Shewing withall the many errors, differences, and oversights of sundry Authors that have formerly written of them; and a certaine confidence, or most probable conjecture of the true and genuines Herbes and Plants. Distributes into sundry Classes or Tribes. The monumental work of herbal medicine by the English herbalist and botanist John Parkinson (1567-1650) in which over 3,800 plants are described and illustrated by approximately 2,600 woodcut illustrations. Theatrum Botanicum was a standard reference for apothecaries for over a century after it was published.
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Weirdo No. 1
AU$200.00 Read MoreAdd to cartRobert Crumb
Berkeley: Last Gasp, 1981.“Picking up where Zap left off, Weirdo defined a new aesthetic for the ’80s, opening the way towards a new wave of comics literacy for a generation of outcasts, oddballs and revolutionaries. Weirdo #1, helmed by Robert Crumb, features comics from Crumb, satiric ads, photo-funnies from “Stomp” Gamos and Weirdo staff, Stanislav Szukalski, Bruce Duncan, Brueghel, a Sub-Genius spread and more!” (publisher’s blurb)
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Oz Magazine (Australia) Complete Set w/ Newsletter
AU$15,000.00 Read MoreAdd to cartRichard 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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The Illegal Relatives
AU$100.00 Read MoreAdd to cartFrank 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
AU$200.00 Read MoreAdd to cartCharles 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
AU$3,000.00 Read MoreAdd to cart[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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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
AU$400.00 Read MoreAdd to cartFrances 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
AU$500.00 Read MoreAdd to cartClinton 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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Les Civilises
AU$800.00 Read MoreAdd to cartClaude Farrere; Henri Le Riche
Paris: Librairie de la Collection des Dix, 1926.French colonizers indulge in fornication, opium, and general debauchery in late 19th century Saigon (then French Cochincina, modern day Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam). One of 200 numbered copies of Arches vellum (of a total edition of 300), bound with the original wrappers.
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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.