Pierre Louÿs - [Lot de 2 volumes] - Les Aventures du roi Pausole / Les Chansons de Bilitis - 1950

LOUÿS (Pierre).

[Lot of 2 volumes] The Adventures of the King Pausole / The Songs of Bilitis.

Paris, La Bonne Compagnie, 1950.

2 volumes in-8 (24 x 16.5 cm), bound with deckle-edged covers, 348-[3] ; 180-[3] pages (complete). Very good condition.

The Adventures of the King Pausole: Printer's run of 1200 copies. One of 1100 copies on wool chiffon (no. 703).

The Songs of Bilitis: Printer's run of 1200 copies. One of 1100 copies on wool chiffon (no. 652).

Many in-text and out-of-text illustrations by Schem and Génia Minache.

The Adventures of the King Pausole is a libertine and fanciful novel by Pierre Louÿs, first published in serial form in 1900, then as a volume in 1901. The final novel completed during the author's lifetime, this work breaks with the tragic tone of his earlier successes (Aphrodite or The Woman and the Puppet) to offer a witty satire of bourgeois morality, Puritanism and bureaucracy.

The Songs of Bilitis is a collection of prose poems published in Paris in 1894 by the French writer Pierre Louÿs. A major work of decadent and erotic literature of the 19th century, the book is initially presented as a literary hoax (or pseudo-translation): Louÿs claims to have translated the work of a fictitious ancient Greek poetess Bilitis from the 6th century BC, a contemporary of Sappho, whose tomb would have been discovered by an archaeologist.

Pleasant copy.