•  Bengesco, Voltaire, 514; Cohen & de Ricci 1035; Graesse 393. Not in Ray, Art of the French Illustrated Book.   Mid-19th-century half dark green morocco and marbled paper–covered sides, leather edges with gilt fillet, spine with gilt-stamped title; spine faintly sunned, minor wear to corners and spine extremities. Top edge gilt. Front pastedown with unidentified dolphin and anchor bookplate. Tissue guard present following frontispiece but not elsewhere. Original ribbon bookmarker present and intact. A very few instances of small, light spots, most pages and certainly the “figures gravèes”) clean and fresh.  (28347)

Histoire de l'oeil was translated from the French as A tale of satisfied desire by “Audiart,” a pseudonym for Austryn Wainhouse (a.k.a. Pieralessandro Casavini), an American Harvard graduate employed by the Olympia Press in Paris who received the National Book Award in 1972 for his translation of Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity. Adapted from Bataille's revised text, first printed in 1944 — the second version, and standard French edition — this translation appeared about the same time as the third French edition. Bataille worked on other projects with both Wainhouse and Maurice Girodias, founder of the Olympia Press, and probably knew of this translation.

The Olympia Press specialized in providing the types of books that would be automatically banned in Britain and the United States. The first to publish Nabokov's Lolita and Donleavy's Ginger Man, Olympia also printed numerous exuberantly pornographic works penned pseudonymously by members of the Paris expatriate community, as well as avant-garde and controversial works by prominent Beat writers including William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso.

Scarce: WorldCat locates just two copies in the U.S.

•  D. Cullen, ed., “Bataille's Eye & ICI Field Notes 4,” The Institute of Cultural Inquiry (1997), p. 25. On this work as censored, see: L. Sigel, International exposure: perspectives on modern European pornography, 1800–2000, pp. 129–30.   Publisher's mustard-colored wrappers printed in black, with white stars and bars; extremities rubbed, wrappers a little scuffed, inside like new.  (30200)

•  Brunet, I, 1756; Palau 54187.   Contemporary treed sheep, spine with gilt-stamped leather title-label and gilt-ruled bands; binding lightly scuffed (most notably at spine), spine with tiny pinholes, front joint just starting from head. Front pastedown with attractive small ticket of a prominent Madrid bookseller. Pages generally lightly age-toned with scattered faint spotting; some leaves browned.  (29248)

•  Straight, Carrington, 186.   Publisher's marble-printed, colored cloth, spines with gilt-stamped title; light wear to corners and spine extremities, spines slightly darkened, head of vol. I with short tear. Top edges gilt. One plate with portion of outer margin torn away, just touching frame of image without affecting image itself. Pages and plates clean.  (29146)

Four volumes in one as issued; each piece was printed in a limited edition of 900 copies.

•  Publisher's blue-green cloth, spine with gilt-stamped Art Nouveau-style title and mermaid decoration; dust jacket lacking, binding a little soiled and slightly cocked with edges and extremities lightly rubbed, corners and center of back cover at top bumped, spine darkened. Pages gently age-toned, otherwise clean. A decent “used” book.  (29695)

contraceptives and their use

Straight's online bibliography of famous publisher of pornography Charles Carrington suggests that he may have been responsible for this volume.

•  Straight, “Charles Carrington,” 133.   Publisher's printed paper wrappers, taped some time ago into a translucent oilcloth protective wrapper (which doesn't photograph well but which we didn't want to take off). Light spotting along inner margins, pages otherwise clean.  (30192)

•  Very good, in publisher's cloth. Front free endpaper torn out. Preliminary pages with a few light creases in fore-margins probably created from paper clips being fastened to them at one time.  (10711)

According to Miller's bibliographers, the 1945 printing uses the same plates as the 1938 edition, explaining why the copyright reads “Reprinted October 1938,” confusing this with the second Obelisk printing. “The actual date of publication is 1945 and is documented in a letter Miller wrote to Ben Abramson in August of that year” (Shifreen & Jackson). Like the copy seen by Shifreen and Jackson, the present copy's leaves vary in size, so that many are shorter than others.

Jack Kahane founded the Obelisk Press at Paris in 1929 to publish illicit English-language books like this free from legal censure.

•  Shifreen & Jackson A12e.   Publisher's steel gray wrappers with white boxes lettered in black; faded and shelf-worn, paper on the lower spine cracked to reveal quires beneath. Age-toning resulting from poor paper quality, as usual for this edition; sewing brittle. Far from pristine; definitely showing evidence of its readership.  (30196)

“I start tomorrow on the Paris book: first person, uncensored, formless — fuck everything!” So wrote Miller to Emil Schnellock in 1931. Three years later, after some financial difficulty, Jack Kahane published Tropic of Cancer at Obelisk in Paris with money Anaïs Nin borrowed from a psychoanalyst. It is the story of Miller's first year in Paris, living hand-to-mouth as a struggling writer.

This edition is the same as the fourth edition in all but wrappers (and the same as the third in pagination, except for necessary variations on the copyright page: “Fifth printing” and “Reprinted January 1939"); our copy'sbinding is blue and white, lettered in black, not the light green wrappers lettered in darker green called for by Shifreen & Jackson.

Jack Kahane founded the Obelisk Press at Paris in 1929 to publish illicit English-language books like this free from legal censure.

•  Shifreen & Jackson A9h.   Binding as above; wrappers faded and creased along the spine, upper joints cracking. A copy that clearly was read more than a few times.  (30191)

•  Publisher's half cream pigskin and light grey/tan cloth, rich eggplant endpapers, front cover with gilt-stamped vignette and spine with gilt-stamped title; binding showing only very minor wear overall, upper edge of front cover with area of faint staining. A clean and attractive copy.  (28154)

•  Bibliography of the Fine Books Published by the Limited Editions Club, 440.   Binding as above, in publisher's glassine dust jacket and original metallic slipcase; volume all but pristine, jacket with a few tiny nicks but an unusually nice example of these impermanent wrappers, case with corners very slightly rubbed. A clean, fresh copy; frankly, one wants to dare say, “could not be better.”  (30130)