Exhibition of Female Flagellants Parts I and II; Lady Bumtickler’s Revels

London [Tours]: G. Peacock [Imp. E. Arrault et Cie], 1777, 1785, and n.d. [1907].
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19cm x 13cm. 207 pages (continuous pagination). Rebound in full blue leather, retaining the original wrappers bearing the Paris imprint of Office Central de Librairie, 71 Rue de Grenelle.

The first three of the seven parts of The Library Illustrative of Social Progress, here reset as a single composite volume. The series was issued clandestinely by John Camden Hotten around 1872, each part under its own false London imprint (1777, 1785, and undated respectively), and a fabricated editorial pedigree: Hotten claimed the texts came “from the original editions collected by” the historian Henry Thomas Buckle. Ashbee in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum disputes this asserting that the volumes had in fact been reprinted, without permission, from a private collection, likely his. This is not Hotten’s printing but a later resetting of these three parts, without plates, continuously paginated where Hotten’s originals are separate. The text carries a false Paris bookselling address on the wrappers but a genuine printer’s mark at the tail of the final page (Imp. E. Arrault et Cie, of Tours, dated 4 March 1907) placing actual production in provincial France some thirty-five years after Hotten’s original printing, behind both an invented London title-page imprint and an invented Paris point of sale. Not in Mendes. Ashbee discusses the constituent texts at length in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, vol. I.

. Fine Condition.

AU$200