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

Paris: Club des Bibliophiles, 1904.
First Edition.

26cm x 18cm. viii, 544 pages. Half leather, marbled papered boards, gilt lettering, top edge gilt, marbled endpapers. Text is in French.

The first printed edition and editio princeps of the text, based on the notorious 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. Bloch prepared the first edition, editing and annotating the text under the pseudonym Eugene Duhren, and issued it via the Berlin bookseller Max Harrwitz, using a fictive Paris imprint to mitigate censorship concerns. In his introduction, Bloch framed the work as a document of scientific and anthropological interest, intended for specialists in sexual pathology, jurisprudence, and cultural history. The text, as here presented, is incomplete and editorially imperfect, deficiencies later addressed in Maurice Heine’s critical edition of 1931-35, prepared from direct examination of the autograph manuscript, yet this remains the foundational printed appearance.

One of 200 numbered copies, this being one of 160 printed on laid paper. Together with the rare original subscription prospectus by Max Harrwitz, three leaves (29cm x 11.cm), folded vertically and complete with original cord.

Minor rubbing to board and leather edges. Very minor general wear and foxing to interior. Near Fine Condition.

AU$6,500.00

1 in stock