Pascal Pia
LETTRESur lesPREMIÈRES ÉDITIONS D’ÉROTIQUESdePIERRE LOUŸS

Pascal Pia

Scissors & Paste Bibliographies
Santa Rosa, CA2019

NoteThe following is my translation into English of a letter written in March 1977 by Pascal Pia to an unnamed recipient. It
was first published, in French, in 1985 at Muizon by WilliamThéry as the first of an occasional series of plaquettes called“Lettres d’Ecrivains” appearing under the imprint of Éditions“A L’Ecart”. The edition was limited to 150 copies, 50 on Hollande van Gelder Zonen and 100 on 100 on papier de Rives. I
am indebted for M. Michael Neal of Paris for generously
providing me with my copy.

Pierre Louÿs2

Dear Sir:I thank you warmly for the bibliographical details in yourletter. I don’t have the Talvart-Place1 bibliography, but it is in
the “usuels”2 room of the catalogues of the Bibliothèque Nationale, where it may be easily consulted. It’s an extremely useful
resource, but should be treated with caution because its authors
sometimes include works which they’ve not actually seen forthemselves and rely instead on bookseller’s catalogues which canbe undependable.
I am fairly familiar with the bibliography of the clandestine
editions of Louÿs published between 1926 and 32 or 33, but I
haven’t collected these works myself, and the BN is far fromhaving them all.
The original edition3 of the Trois filles de leur mère is theone printed in facsimile of the MS, which was sold, when it waspublished in 1926, by the bookseller Gaillandre.4 I have always
thought that Gaillandre was merely the distributor of this edition, which was printed on specially manufactured paper whosewatermark was the name of Pierre Louÿs, written backwards.
The first typographical editions published after that is a large 8vobound in brown wrappers, a copy of which I found by chance3recently on the quais, and an edition of large size, bound in blueor grey boards (my memories, a half-century old, are vague)5.
The edition I found recently was printed by a clandestine publisher at Antwerp whose name I have completely forgotten, but
who I saw once or twice about 1927-28.6 He was Flemish andhis knowledge of French was weak.
Another edition I might mention was of German origin(Leipzig or Frankfurt).7 These two editions were certainly not
circulated widely in France. Pieyre de Mandiargues,8 in his Preface to the Desforges edition, ignorantly assembles a series ofcomplete untruths.9
The first edition10 of L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve is thequarto published in 1927 and which has a frontispiece reproducing a page of the original manuscript. I arranged for the bookto be printed at the expense of my friend Bonnel.11 It wasprinted in Paris by a small, craftsman printer named Gaston Coquette and who had a workshop at 69, rue de la Glacière. Later,in 1931 or 1932, the same printer prepared for Bonnel an edition of Gonzalve in a smaller format, illustrated with etchings
by Brouet. This edition is generally to be found in blue boards,
but a score of copies were bound in full morocco by one of thebest bookbinders of the day, Huser, who, because of the small
size of the book, was able to use pieces of morocco left overfrom the bindings of quartos and folios he’d done for others.
This explains why this edition is to be found bound in moroccoof different colors, red, green, yellow, &c. These bindings alone
would make the books expensive today because Huser’s work
is greatly valued by collectors.12
The first edition13 of the Douze douzaines, which must also
have appeared in 1927, was published by a bookseller now dead
named Robert Télier. He was a Swiss, and located in Paris on
the rue de l’Université, close to the rue de Saints-Pères, at thesign of “Au Lys rouge.”
4There were various editions of erotic poetry, which is to say
various editions of different texts. The first14 was a 16mo, limited
to just 60 or 75 copies, which was published in 1927 with thefalse imprint ‘Liège,’ and printed by Coquette for Bonnel, fromthe original manuscript loaned by a Raoul Simonson,15 abookseller in Bruxelles, who’d had bought them from Bernard16
and resold them to a Belgian collector named Hayoit.17 This M.
Hayoit, who owned, in Belgium, a chain of shops specializing
in women’s blouses along the same lines as the ‘100,000 shoes’
chain in France, gave his consent to publish the MS pages that
he had acquired, with the proviso that the edition would be
extremely limited.
Later, in 1931 or 1932, Bonnel reprinted the same poems,
but in a large quarto format with original lithographs by Vertès.
I still have a copy of this edition which is dated “l’an I de laRépublique Catalane” (it was after the abdication of Alphonse
XIII and the creation, in Barcelona, of a Catalan “generalidad”
presided over by colonel Macià). The text of this edition wasprinted at Paris by Massol on rue Tourloque, and the illustrations by Vertès by Mme Duchatel on rue Henri-Monnier.18(18)La Femme 19 appeared a little later (1936 or 1937). The publisher was Georges Briffaut, and it was edited by Perceau. I don’tknow who owned the manuscript and the drawings by PL
which were used for this edition.
The first edition of Pybrac was published in 1927, and had
as the imprint “Au Coq Hardi.” The only illustration for it wasan engraved vignette (by Foujita) which decorated the title
page.
Later, Vertès himself illustrated and published another edition (in 1928), limited to 100 copies at most, and which had as
the imprint “les sœurs des Ursulines à Narbonne”, but it is atbest a poor imitation and cannot be described as a counterfeit.
The original edition of the Manuel de Civilité was in 1926.
It was the first erotic work by Louys to have the honour of5

being printed. The publisher was [Simon] Kra. The title and thepages are bordered in coloured frames (red or blue, my memories are fuzzy).
The edition of Aphrodite in 2 volumes, plus a volume ofnotes and facsimiles, appeared in 1928. The text was printed byCoquette, but I no longer recall the name of the copper-plate
printer who handled the illustrations, which were by a Russianartist named Serge Czerefkow. The manuscripts which wereused to establish the text belonged to Jacques Lipschutz, abookseller on rue Lamartine, who later moved to the place del’Odéon. As he was Jewish, Lipschutz had the good sense toleave for the USA in June [19]40 where he died a few years
later. But the publisher of this edition of Aphrodite was again
my friend Bonnel, who’d had dealings with Lipschutz.
Poèmes erotiques inédits, published in 1947 rather than 1945
as stated, had a preface by Georges Hugnet (G.H.) and was published by a bookseller in Nice, and printed there. I don’t know
who did the illustrations, probably an artist in Nice of no great
talent.
I will try to find and date the reprints of these various erotic
works, but it will not be easy. The majority of the booksellers
and brokers who could have informed me about the clandestine
productions of the years 1935-36 (Lubineau, Briffaut, &c.) are
now dead.
As you are interested in PL, I thought I should tell you right
now that what I know came from a reliable source. Bonnel diedin 1975, and no one after me would be able to give serious
information on the first editions of erotica by Louÿs.
I knew Artaud around the time of his Parisien debut (192122), that is to say when he joined the Atelier Dullin and became
friendly with Génica Athanassiou, but I confess that I tried toavoid him. As a drug addict he was watched on by police, orrather the police kept an eye on him to get their hands on thecoke dealers. It would have been unwise for me to be in his6company. They would have tailed me, and Bonnel and I would
have got into trouble.
I think I’ll be seeing Régine Deforges again shortly, and I’ll
share with you anything I learn.
Kind regards

Translation copyright © Patrick J. Kearney 2019NOTES

1
Talvert-Place is the French national bibliography which, I am informed,
has not progressed beyond the letter ‘M’.
2“Usuels” refers to the free access, or open shelves, of the Library.
3‘P.L. | TROIS FILLES | DE | LEUR MÈRE | [monogramme] AUX
DÉPENS D'UN AMATEUR | ET POUR SES AMIS’. 4to (28 x 19 cm), 5ff, 361 pages. White printed wrappers, reproducing the titlepage on the front
cover. Translator’s copy.
4C. Gaillandre, a bookseller & publisher who, in the 1920s and 30s was
located at 21, quai Malaquais, Paris 6e.
5The large-format edition of Trois filles de leur mère described as being“bound in blue or gray boards” cannot be identified.
6‘P.L. | TROIS FILLES | DE | LEUR MÈRE | [device] | MONTPELÉ | MARTINIQUE’. 4to (24.5 x 16.5 cm), 4 ff, 200 pages. Brown wrappers printed in black. This edition was probably published c. 1930. Translator'scopy.
7‘TROIS | FILLES | DE | LEUR | MÈRE’. 8vo (18.3 x 12.1 cm), 4ff, 302 pages. The translator's copy has been rebound in green cloth, with a7

red leather label blocked in gilt on the spine. Limited to 250 machine-numbered copies: nos. 1 & 2 on parchemin, nos. 3 – 25 on Chine and nos. 26 –250 on Hollande. The edition was published in Germany by Officina Serpentis, and printed by W. Tieffenbach. Translator’s copy.
8André Pieyre de Mandiargues (1909 - 1991) was a French writer bornin Paris. He became an associate of the Surrealists and married the Italianpainter Bona Tibertelli de Pisis (a niece of the Italian metaphysical painterCount Filippo Tibertelli de Pisis). He was a close friend of the painter LeonorFini.
9The Régine Deforges edition of Trois filles de leur mère was publishedopenly in 1970. Pieyre de Mandiargues’ Introduction occupies [9]-15. A
translation of the Introduction by Alexis Lykiard was published by Scissors &Paste Bibliographies, Santa Rosa, California, in 2004.
10‘HISTOIRE DU | ROI GONZALVE | ET LES DOUZE | PRINCESSES [device of crown] | AUX DÉPENS D'UN BIBLIOPHILE | MADRID’. 4to (26.5 x 21.8 cm), 38 ff. Bound in wrappers reproducing the titlepage. Limited to 100 copies on vélin de Hollande Pannekoek. Translator'scopy.
11René Bonnel (1884-1975), one of the great clandestine publishers ofthe 20th century. Bonnel was responsible for fine editions of erotic works byGuillaume Apollinaire, George Bataille, Louis Aragon, Pierre Mac Orlan, Alfred Jarry, among others. He also published some good pastiches of erotic
poems by Apollinaire, Raymond Radiguet, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles
Baudelaire, actually the handiwork of Pascal Pia.
12‘HISTOIRE DU | ROI GONZALVE | ET LES DOUZE | PRINCESSES [device of crown] | AUX DÉPENS D'UN BIBLIOPHILE | MADRID’. 16mo (10 x 7.2 cm), 2 ff., 130 pages, 3 ff. 'Couverture remplée enpapier Ingres rose avec étiquette, ou couvertue en papier brun avec étiquettejaune imprimée en rouge et noir.' Illustrated with twelve etchings by AugusteBrouet. Limited to 5 copies on Japon impérial and 200 copies on vélin deMontgolfier. The description of this edition is extracted from: Jean-PierreDutel, Bibliographie des ouvrages érotiques publiés clandestinement en français entre 1920 et 1970 (Paris, The Author, 2005).
13[Title in facsimile of original MS over a coloured engraving:] ‘DOUZEDOUZAINS DE DIALOGUES | OU | PETITES SCENESAMOUREUSES | ★ ’. 4to in leaves (23.5 x 17.5 cm), 68 ff. Illustrated with12 coloured etchings by Andre Collot. Limited to 100 copies on Japon nacre.
Published entirely in facsimile of the original manuscript, with the exceptionof the notice of limitation. Translator's copy‘POÈSIES | ÉROTIQUES | de | Pierre Louÿs | Imprimé aLiège | 1927’. 8vo (19.3 x 14 cm), 70 pages, 3 ff. Limited to 69 copies.
The description of this edition is extracted from: Jean-Pierre Dutel,
148

Bibliographie des ouvrages érotiques publiés clandestinement en français entre 1920 et 1970 (Paris, The Author, 2005).
15In addition to being a bookseller, Raoul Simonson was an author andbibliographer. He compiled a Bibliographie de l’œuvre de André Gide, 18911924 (Maestricht: Boosten & Stols, 1924) and in collaboration with Ronald
Davis a Bibliographie des œuvres de Paul Valéry (Paris, Pour la collection de“Plaisir de Bibliophilie”, 1926).
16‘Bernard’. An obscure allusion, but perhaps a reference to “the mysterious… pharmacist-bookseller ‘Dr.’ Edmond [Dardenne] Bernard,” as the late
Gershon Legman described him, who apparently acquired Pierre Louÿs’ erotic
manuscripts from the poet’s widow and one of his secretaries, and sold thempiecemeal to collectors, who in turn, in some instances, arranged for their subrosa publication. See: G. Legman, The Horn Book; Studies in Erotic Folkelore & Bibliography (New York: university Books, 1964), and in particular
Mr. Legman’s Avant-Propos (in French translation) to Chansons de Salle deGarde (Paris: Cercle du Livre Precieuse, 1962).

Charles Hayoit (1901-1984), a notable Belgian book collector
whose exceptional private library of first edition French literature wasauctioned at Paris in 2001 by Sotheby / Poulain Le Fur. The catalogueof the sale was in five volumes, the fourth of which contained a number of important items by Pierre Louÿs, including such wonders as thebeautifully bound original MS of Trois filles de leur mère, and theoriginal MS of Douze Douzains de Dialogues, which had formerly
belonged to Maurice Sachs and Andre Maurois.
18‘POESIES | EROTIQUES | D’ | UN | AUT | UR CE | LEBRE,
17| ILLUSTRE | ES DE TR | ENTE-DEUX | LITHOGRAPHIES |ORIGINALES | DESSINEES | PAR UN | ARTISTE | INCON | NU |★ | BARCELONE | ATARAZANAS | (BARRIO CHINO) | L’AN I
DE LA REPUBLIQUE | CATALANE’. 4to in leaves (26 x 20.3 cm) 52 ff.
‘couverture rempliee imprime en noir et gris, chemise et etui recouverts depapier Ingres gris’. 32 lithographs by Marcel Vertès. Limited to 165 copies.
The description of this edition is extracted from: Jean-Pierre Dutel, Biblio-graphie des ouvrages érotiques publiés clandestinement en français entre 1920et 1970 (Paris, The Author, 2005).
‘PIERRE LOUŸS | LA FEMME |TRENTE-NEUF POÈMES
ÉROTIQUES INÉDITS | AVEC 16 DESSINS DE L'AUTEUR | REPRODUITS EN FACSIMILE | ET UN PORTRAIT GRAVÉ | PAR |P.-A. LAURENS | - MYTILÈNE - | A L'ENSEIGNE DE BILITIS|MIMXXXVIII’. 4to 1ff. 96 pages. 7ff . Bistre wrappers, with printed paperlabel on the front cover. Preface signed “L. P.” [i.e., Louis Perceau]. One
portrait and twelve drawings by Louÿs. Limited to 10 copies on Japon ancien
and 250 copies on Vélin de Rives. Translator’s copy, from the library of Gershon Legman.
199