36 30th June 2012 antiquarian books


Left: the original seven-part issue Richard Burton’s translation of The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana of 1883 was supposedly produced in Benares as an edition of 250 sets for the members of the Hindoo Kama Shastra Society. There were, in fact, only two members of that society, Burton himself and ‘Bunny’ Arbuthnot, a close friend and fellow student of Hindu erotic literature, but publishing it in this manner enabled Burton to circumvent the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. Sold for £9000 at Christie’s on June 13 was one of these exceptionally rare sets, complete with all wrappers, bound in red calf of the period and contained in a Cosway-style red morocco gilt clamshell case inset with three erotic miniatures.


curiosa and erotica


continued from page 35 The frontispiece by Carrée after Chéry,


showing Virtue assailed by Lechery and Irreligion, is shaved at the lower edge and the endpapers show manuscript annotations in pencil and a glued-in note. There are some tears to margins, along with some soiling and and slight browning to the text, but this untrimmed copy, the two volumes bound as one in modern but period-style calf gilt, sold at €50,000 (£40,105). The record stands at €68,000 (then £59,880) for a copy in contemporary calf sold at Christie’s Paris in 2009.


British & Irish Book Auctions


Jun 27*@ 33-lot Book Section: Arms & Militaria Sale,Thomas Del Mar - London W14 (020 7602 4085) Jun 27*@


11-lot Book Section, Nesbits - Southsea (023 9229 5568)


Jun 28*@ Historical Documents, Autographs & Ephemera, Mullock’s - Ludlow (01568 770803) Jun 28*@ Jun 28*@ Jun 28*@


9-lot Book Section, Chorleys - Cheltenham (01452 344499) Book Section, Shouler & Son - Melton Mowbray (01664 560181) 12-lot Book Section, Wright Manley - Beeston Castle (01829 262150)


Jun 28*@ 15-lots Boxed Books, mostly Railways, Richard Winterton - Lichfield (01543 251081) Jun 28*@ Book Sale, incl. Lib. of a Prof of Art History at Oxford, Mallams - Oxford (01865 241358) Jun 29*@ Jun 30*@


17-lot Book Section, Rendells - Ashburton (01364 653017)


Jun 30-Jul 1*@ Jul 1*@ Jul 2*@ Jul 5@ Jul 5@ Jul 6*@ Jul 9* Jul 10 Jul 10 Jul 10


Jul 10@


Jul 10-11*@ Jul 11*@ Jul 14*@


Book Section, Steven B.Bruce - Stratford-upon-Avon (07778 595952) Cricket, Football & General Sports Auction, Knights (01263 768488) Sports Memorabilia, Nick Barber Auctions - Felixstowe (01394 283266) Football & Rugby League Sale, Football Sports Auctions- Hitchin (07588 594664) Bibliophile Sale, Bloomsbury Auctions - Godalming (020 7495 9494) Books, Maps & Prints, Cheffins - Cambridge (01223 213343) Book Section, W & H Peacock - Bedford (01234 266366) Book Section, Piers Motley - Exmouth (01395 267403)


English Literature & History, Children’s Books & Original Illustration, Sotheby’s (020 7293 5297) Western MSS & Miniatures, Sotheby’s (020 7293 5334)


History of Script: 60 MS Leaves from the Martin Schoyen Colln, Sotheby’s (020 7293 5334) Antiquarian & Collectable Books, Toovey’s - Washington (01903 891955) incl. Conan Doyle Archive, Sworders - Stansted Mountfitchett (01279 817778) 22-lot Book Section, Peter Wilson - Nantwich (01270 623878) 180-lot Book Section: Angling Sale Mullock’s - Ludlow (01694 771771)


Sales marked with an * are those in which books and ephemera form part of a larger sale. Sales marked @ have viewable catalogues on www.the-saleroom.com. Auctioneers are asked to send details of specialist book sales, as well as those sales that may contain significant book and ephemera sections, to: Ian McKay Tel: (01795) 890475 • ianmckay1@btinternet.com


The second edition, again in a recent


but period-style binding, sold at €18,000 (£15,340). A Cosway-bound, 1883 first of Richard


Burton’s translation of The Kama Sutra... is illustrated and described above left. Seen at Christie’s on June 13 was a


largely unopened copy of the famous Aubrey Beardsley-illustrated edition of The Lysistrata of Aristophanes published by Leonard Smithers in 1896. At one stage in his short life, Beardsley


told a friend that he thought the drawings he had made for Aristophanes’ play, about an attempt by the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands and lovers as a means of forcing their men to negotiate an end to


Above: the principal illustration from a copy of Mallarmé’s L’après midi d’une faune, to which Aubrey Beardsley added his own decorations. Sold by Bonhams for £13,000.


the Peloponnesian War, a strategy that instead only inflames the battle between the sexes, were “in a way the best things I have ever done”. However, when he knew he was dying,


Beardsley wrote to Smithers and begged him “...to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings – By all that is holy, all obscene drawings”. Smithers, of course, did nothing of the kind. Still in the original blue paper-covered


boards, this great rarity, one of only 100 copies with plates printed on Japanese vellum, sold at £4000. The price was a mid-estimate one, but the only copy to have made more was one containing a letter from Beardsley to Smithers that sold for £5500 at Sotheby’s in 1999. On the previous day, June 12,


Bonhams had taken an under-estimate bid of £13,000 on Beardsley’s own illustrated copy of Mallarmé’s L’après midi d’une faune. This comprised part of an 1882 edition that had been bound (perhaps by Smithers) into vellum wrappers with seven pages of drawings or decorations by Beardsley, the most striking of them being an image of the faun’s head and chest, with hairs trailing into the initials AVB. This principal drawing was later published by Smithers in A Second Book, of Fifty Drawings (1899). Beardsley’s influence could be seen


in the illustration by V.A.Milashevskii to M.A.Kuzmin’s Zanaveshennye lartinki [Curtained Windows] sold for $11,000 (£7010) in the Russian book section of a June 19, Bonhams New York sale. Described as the “nonpareilof Soviet homerotica”’, this notorious work of 1920 bears a false Amsterdam imprint, but this was a way round a ban imposed by Soviet censors and the 307 copies were available only to vetted collectors and direct from Kuzmin. Though its author defended it as


a serious work of art to friends and publishers, even describing it as “my best book so far”, Lolita was rejected by both UK and US publishers before finally finding its way into print via the louche


path of Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press in Paris and remains controversial to this day. That two-volume paperback edition


of 1955 did not at first sell well, but then Graham Greene included it in a year-end list of best new novels in The Times and wider public interest was aroused. Girodias promptly raised the price of


those unsold copies from 900 to 1200 francs, either by overlaying the printed price with a sticker or simply crossing it out and altering it by hand. In Britain, Greene’s promotion of the


book so enraged the Sunday Express’ John Gordon that he wrote of it as “the filthiest book I have ever read – unrestrained pornography”. This was guaranteed to raise sales, but the Home Office ordered all copies entering the country to be seized by Customs officers and even managed to persuade the French Ministry of the Interior to institute a ban that lasted for two years. At King Street on June 13, a first-issue


copy in the familiar green paper covers, but one in which the price had been altered by hand to read 1200 francs on the rear cover of Vol. I, sold at £2000. Unaltered copies are more desirable


and only last October, one such sold for $7500 (£4755) at Sotheby’s New York. In 2002 at Christie’s New York,


however, an Olympia first that Nabokov inscribed for Graham Greene (in 1959) was sold for $240,000 (then £153,410) as part of the Rechler library. Nabokov’s contract with Girodias had


expired in 1957 and in the following year Putnam issued a first US edition. Rechler’s copy of that edition, one that the writer had inscribed to his wife Vera and, like the copy he later gave to Greene, featured one of his characteristic drawings of a butterfly, was sold for $140,000 (£89,450). The first English edition was issued by Weidenfeld & Nicholson in 1959 and a copy of that edition inscribed “To Graham Greene, whose courageous support of this book will always be remembered...”, was bid to $100,000 (£63,920) in the Rechler sale.


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