Femmes

Second edition, one of 20 copies on japon, followed by 480 numbered copies on hollande.

Contemporary full green morocco binding, spine with five raised bands, title and author lettered in gilt,  armorial stamp of Aleister Crowley and his motto “SPES” on upper cover and crowned cipher “AC” on lower cover, original wrappers preserved, marbled paper pastedowns and endpapers, inner gilt dentelle, roll tool on edges and spine-ends, top edge gilt, sunned spine, boards with slightly darkened margins, split at foot of upper joint.

A rare and luxurious erotic pamphlet by Verlaine, from the library of the “Beast of the Apocalypse 666”, the notorious British occultist Aleister Crowley, with his rare armorial stamp and cipher.

In 1895, the year this collection appeared, Crowley was twenty years old and began his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge. It was most likely very shortly after publication that the fiery-eyed dandy had the volume bound in his arms. He borrowed the design from a noble family of the same name, featuring three roses on a chevron to which he added the motto “SPES” on a scroll — a Latin phrase that would later reappear in the title of his poem collection Summa Spes (1903). British Armorial Bindings only records two further Crowley bindings bearing identical gilt stamps: the first is an eighteenth-century play, which Crowley also had bound in full morocco, now held at Marsh‘s Library in Dublin (Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer). The second is none other than an edition of Baudelaire‘s poems (Calmann Lévy, 1896), revealing his fascination with two Gallic rhymers who, like him, indulged freely in the pleasures of the flesh as well as ‘artificial paradises’.

Crowley would even translate the celebrated Poem of Haschich into English. That Baudelaire copy, now part of Gerald Yorke‘s great Crowleyana collection at the Warburg Institute, bears his ownership inscription on a flyleaf (Aleister Crowley Trinity College, Cambridge) confirming that these bindings were made shortly after the books‘ publication. We have located no other bindings of this type in the Yorke collection or at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, which also holds one of the largest collections on the magician.

These exceedingly rare copies demonstrate that his love for fine books developed at a very early age, with these depraved talisman-poems by Verlaine and Baudelaire stamped with his arms. A true incarnation of Huysmans‘s Des Esseintes, Crowley is better known for bibliophilic pursuits of a different order: his substantial paternal fortune afforded him whatever he desired including the publication of his own poems and esoteric writings.

As author-publisher, he treated his own books as ritual objects, in which the physical beauty was an integral part of their magical efficacy. The young Crowley justifiably had set his sights on the luxury issue of this Verlaine poem collection, selecting one of the twenty copies on papier japon which he later also favoured for his own publications.

His appetite for the written word was matched only by his legendary carnal hunger. In Verlaine, Crowley found inspiration for his own clandestine collections (most notably the homoerotic White Stains), in which he used Eros as a vehicle for spiritual revolt. Crowley invoked Verlaine on numerous occasions throughout his work: in his essays on drugs, and in his magical diaries. In his poem “Rosa Mundi” he even expressed a desire to surpass the great names of poetry, among them Verlaine:

“Were this the quintessential plume of Keats
And Shelley and Swinburne and Verlaine,
Could I outsoar them, all their lyric feats,
Excel their utterance vain.”

In Vanity Fair he also translated him twice (“Colloque sentimental”, “With Muted Strings”), and naturally quoted him in his essay on absinthe which they both consumed in great quantities (Absinthe: The Green Goddess, 1917). It is indeed in the vibrant colour of the Green Goddess that he chose to house his copy of the scandalous verses by the “Prince des poètes”  in luxurious green goatskin.

An exceedingly scarce and hitherto unrecorded copy, emblematic of the extreme decadent eroticism that Aleister Crowley cultivated in his early years, which later morphed into his infamous celebrated rituals of sexual magic.