Les 120 Journees de Sodome, ou l’Ecole du Libertinage, par le Marquis de Sade

Paris: S. & C., aux Depens des Bibliophiles Souscripteurs, 1931-36.
First Thus.

27cm x 21cm. xvi, 218; [viii], [219]-401; [iv], [402]-498, [2]; [4] pages, 16 plates, 3 volumes bound in 1 with the suite of plates. Half leather, gilt lettering, top edge gilt, marbled endpapers. Original printed wrappers bound in. Typescript index of plate locations bound in at rear. Text is in French.

The first critical edition of the text, and the first established directly from the autograph manuscript written by Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade in the Bastille in 1785. The manuscript, composed in minute script on a continuous paper roll, was long presumed lost following the storming of the Bastille, before resurfacing in the late nineteenth century and coming into the hands of the Berlin physician and pioneering sexologist Iwan Bloch, whose foundational but flawed 1904 edition first brought the text into print. Following Bloch’s death, the manuscript entered French ownership (often associated with the patronage circle of Charles de Noailles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, a descendant of Sade), enabling the Sade specialist Maurice Heine to prepare the present edition under their support. Working directly from the autograph roll, Heine produced a transcription of far greater fidelity than Bloch’s, accompanied by a substantial critical apparatus keyed to the original manuscript and including a photographic facsimile as frontispiece. Heine’s engagement with Sade was both scholarly and personal: he first encountered the work through Bloch’s edition in 1912, later recalling (most notably in the 1933 ‘Minotaure enquete’ organised by Andre Breton and Paul Eluard) that discovery as decisive. Pascal Pia would subsequently credit Heine with establishing the modern text of Sade. Issued in a limited edition of 396 numbered copies, this example is one of 300 on velin de Rives. It is here bound with the complete suite of sixteen lithographs by Andre Collot, separately issued in a limited edition (c. 1936) and intended for addition to subscribers’ sets and unsold copies.

Minor wear and discolouration to binding. Minor foxing to front flyleaves of part 3. Near Fine Condition.

AU$3,500.00

1 in stock