Sale 2514 - The Pride Sale, June 20, 2019

9  NICOLAS CHORIER (1612-1692) The Dialogues of Luisa Sigea, Literally Translated from the Latin. 3 volumes. Half-titles. Titles in red and black. Slim 8vo, contemporary 3 / 4 green morocco, spines tooled in gilt, red morocco lettering pieces, top edges gilt, spines uniformly faded to brown. Paris: Isidore Liseux, 1890. [300/400] one of the most notorious amatory classic works of the 17 th century . The Dialogues are considered the first pornographic work written in Latin. The first edition was published in 1660 under the title, Aloisiae Sigaeae, Toletanae, Satyra Sotadica de Arcanis Amoris et Veneris. The attribution to Spanish poet Luisa Sigea was in fact a hoax, the real author being Nicolas Chorier. 10 c ALEISTERCROWLEY (1875-1947) White Stains: The Literary Remains of George Archibald Bishop: A Neuropath of the Second Empire. 4to, black cloth lettered in white, slightly rubbed, small mark to left corner by title; hinges starting; custom purple morocco backed slipcase and chemise. Printed on Van Gelder paper. Provenance: J.B. Rund,with his bookplate and his customary penciled notes on the front endpaper. [Amsterdam: Leonard Smithers,] 1898. [5,000/7,500] first edition of the extremely rare and most explicitly erotic late V ictorian verse , and among the rarest of Crowley’s works. Number 69 of only 100 copies. Crowley later wrote that his examination of sexual deviance is “commonly quoted by my admirers as evidence of my addiction to every kind of unmentionable vice. Asses! It is, indeed, technically an obscene book, and yet the fact that I wrote it proves the purity of my heart and mind in the most extraordinary fashion... I wrote the book in absolute seriousness and in all innocence. It never occurred to me that a demonstration of the terrible results of misguided passion might be mistaken for pornography.” This copy is numbered in purple ink, likely by publisher Leonard Smithers, and inscribed “les revenants” alluding perhaps to the evocative number of this copy. Many copies of White Stains are recorded as having been destroyed by H.M. Customs in 1924 and only a few have come to auction in the past fifty years. Cornelius Crowley, page 207; Mendes 121. 9 10