Text of Attorney General vs. A Book Named “Naked Lunch”: http://masscases.com/cases/sjc/351/351mass298.html
]]>Burroughs, William S. The Naked Lunch. Paris: Olympia Press, [1959]. Lilly Library: PS3503.U78 N16
In The Naked Lunch by William Seward Burroughs (1914-97), the narrator William Lee crosses the United States into Mexico, where he regularly meets his drug dealers, and then travels to Tangier. In the course of his journey, he explores his drug addiction, homosexuality, and various sexual deviances in lurid violent vignettes. The first excerpts of the novel were issued in a student magazine at the University of Chicago in 1958. In Paris, Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press brought out the first complete edition of the novel in July 1959. The U.S. Customs seized several copies of the book that Girodias had tried to distribute in the United States, since the work was considered contraband material. The first U.S. edition of Naked Lunch was published by Grove Press in 1962. The book was brought to trial on obscenity charges after a Boston bookseller was arrested for selling copies of it. The case was handled by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, but the hearing was delayed until after the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Memoirs v. Massachussets in March 1966, which confirmed that a “book cannot be held to be obscene in view of substantial evidence showing that it has literary, historical, and social importance” (383 U.S. 413). Following this decision, the Massachusetts Supreme Court cleared Naked Lunch of obscenity charges (see Attorney General vs. A Book Named “Naked Lunch”, 351 Mass. 298). At a 1962 symposium in Edinburgh, Burroughs argued that “Censorship […] is the presumed right of governmental agencies to decide what words and images the citizen is permitted to see. That is precisely thought-control. […] If censorship were removed, perhaps books would be judged more on literary merit, and a dull, poorly written book on a sexual subject would find few readers. Fewer people would be stimulated by the sight of a four-letter word on the printed page. The anxiety and prurience of which censorship is the overt political phenomenon has so far prevented any serious scientific investigation of sexual phenomena.”
Text of Attorney General vs. A Book Named “Naked Lunch”: http://masscases.com/cases/sjc/351/351mass298.html
Lord Auch [Georges Bataille]. Histoire de l’œil. Illustrated by Hans Bellmer. Séville, 1940 [Paris: K éditeur, 1947]. Kinsey Institute Library: 843.8 B33 h6 1940
The first work of fiction published by Georges Bataille (1897-1862), Histoire de l’œil [Story of the Eye] chronicles the sexual escapades and misbehavior of a nameless uninhibited teenage narrator, his main lover Simone, an English voyeur, and a suicidal mentally-ill sixteen-year-old girl called Marcelle. One of the episodes describes the murder of a seduced Spanish priest who is strangled after reaching sexual climax with Simone. His eye is then inserted into sundry cavities, hence the title. The first edition of the book was published, under the pseudonym of Lord Auch, by René Bonnel in 1928. The “new version” exhibited here, illustrated with six etchings by the German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975), was edited by the writer and publisher Alain Gheerbrant in 1947 (in spite of the date indicated on the title-page). A later edition, clandestinely published in 1951 in Paris, was condemned by the Criminal Court of the Seine, France, on May 8, 1951. The first edition to be issued under the author’s real name was published in the late 1960s, after Bataille’s death, by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, notable for also publishing the works of the Marquis de Sade.
Miller, Henry, Tropic of Cancer. Paris: Obelisk Press, 1934. Lilly Library: PS3525.I34 T7
Written in the first person, Tropic of Cancer is a fictionalized autobiographical treatment of Henry Miller’s struggle as an author in his early years in Paris. The novel, which contains many passages that graphically delineate the narrator’s sexual encounters in the French capital, was published by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press in Paris in 1934, prefaced and financed by Anaïs Nin with money borrowed from the psychoanalyst Otto Rank. As indicated on the front cover, illustrated by the publisher’s son Maurice Kahane, this edition could not be legally “imported into Great Britain or U.S.A.” Miller consistently objected to having expurgated versions of the novel issued in the United States. The publication of an uncensored U.S. edition by Grove Press in June 1961 sparked a string of litigation across the country, involving the American Civil Liberties Union, with several vendors of Tropic of Cancer arrested by police officials. In 1964, the Supreme Court eventually cleared the novel of obscenity charges and allowed its sale on the strength of the First Amendment (Grove Press v. Gerstein, 378 U.S. 577). The copy exhibited here bears an autograph dedication by Henry Miller to his fellow-American writer and political activist Max Eastman (1883-1969).
Full text: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100181h.html
Text of Grove Press, Inc. v. Christenberry, 175 F. Supp. 488 (S.D.N.Y. 1959): https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/175/488/1382008/
UK National Archive on “The Chatterley Trial 1960”: https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php?title=The_Chatterley_Trial_1960
]]>Lawrence, David Herbert. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. [Florence:] Privately Printed, 1928. Lilly Library: PR6023.A9 L13 1928a
One of most famous and controversial twentieth-century English erotic novels, Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) revolves around Constance, the eponymous character, whose husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, became paralyzed from the waist down while fighting in World War I. Feeling neglected by her husband, Constance engages in an extramarital affair, the subject of sexually explicit scenes and language, with their gamekeeper. Probably completed in 1917, the novel was first privately printed in Florence in 1928. In 1931, two years after Lawrence’s death, Seeker produced a bowdlerized edition of the book in England. After publishing the first U.S. uncensored edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1959, Grove Press of New York went to court following the seizure of the book by the U.S. Post Office on the basis of obscenity. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found in Grove’s favor, with Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan concluding that “if a work is found to be of literary stature, and not ‘hard core’ pornography, it is a fortiori within the protections of the First Amendment” (Grove Press, Inc. v. Christenberry, 175 F. Supp. 488 [S.D.N.Y. 1959]). Also in 1959, Penguin issued the first unexpurgated edition of the novel in England and was taken to court under the Obscene Publications Act. The jury concluded that the book was not pornography, as it did not deprave its readership. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was also banned and/or legally challenged in Australia, Canada, Japan, and India.
Full text: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100181h.html
Text of Grove Press, Inc. v. Christenberry, 175 F. Supp. 488 (S.D.N.Y. 1959): https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/175/488/1382008/
UK National Archive on “The Chatterley Trial 1960”: https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php?title=The_Chatterley_Trial_1960
Full text: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4300
Text of United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses” (trial court decision): https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/5/182/2250768/
Text of United States v. One Book Entitled “Ulysses” by James Joyce (appellate court decision): https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/72/705/1549734/
]]>Joyce, James. Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922. Lilly Library: PR6019.O9 U4 1922
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Illustrated by Henri Matisse. New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1935. Lilly Library: Z274.A2 T43 no. 74
In 1914, the Irish novelist James Joyce (1881-1942) started writing Ulysses, the odyssey of a day in the lives of a few Dubliners. After the judicial upheavals he suffered for his collection of stories Dubliners (1914), Joyce had his friend Ezra Pound intervene in the publication of Ulysses, and the New York Little Review began to serialize the text in 1918. Despite these precautions, the U.S. Post Office seized and destroyed several issues of the magazine in 1919 and 1920. In 1921, the publishers of the Little Review were prosecuted for obscenity and subsequently barred from publishing any further episode of Ulysses. Shortly afterwards, Sylvia Beach, the owner of the Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company, had the printer Maurice Darantière produce a first complete edition of the book in Dijon in 1922. The 1000 copies were quickly sold out and later editions started to be smuggled out of France. In the United States, Random House eventually challenged the ban and the case was brought to the New York District Court in November 1933 (United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses). In this landmark decision, which established a new standard for judging books charged with obscenity, Judge John Woolsey concluded: “Whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac. Ulysses may, therefore, be admitted into the United States.” Soon after, in 1934, Random House issued the first complete U.S. edition of the book. The second edition exhibited here, published in 1,500 copies in New York in 1935, is illustrated with six etchings and several preparatory drawings by Henri Matisse (1869-1954). One of the two copies held at the Lilly Library (no. 1089) is autographed by Matisse and Joyce.
Full text: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4300
Text of United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses” (trial court decision): https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/5/182/2250768/
Text of United States v. One Book Entitled “Ulysses” by James Joyce (appellate court decision): https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/72/705/1549734/
Radiguet, Raymond. Vers libres. Illustrated by R[ojan]. Nogent: Au Panier Fleuri [Paris, between 1936 and 1939]. Kinsey Institute Library: 841.8 R12 v5 1935b
In his “free verses,” the young prodigy Raymond Radiguet (1903-23), author of the acclaimed novel Le Diable au corps [The Devil in the Flesh] (1923), often mingles innocence and inchoate sexuality. The pornographic poems depict young girls who lose their virginity, indulge in Sapphic behavior in public, or are suggestively chastised by older men. The first, posthumous edition of the collection was clandestinely published by René Bonnel, in 1926, that is, three years after Radiguet’s death. The edition exhibited here, illustrated with thirty-two lascivious drawings watercolored by Feodor Rojankovsky (better known under the pseudonym Rojan, 1891-1970), was issued sometime between 1936 and 1939. Radiguet’s authorship of the poems was contested by his family and friends, including Jean Cocteau, and the writer’s true identity remained shrouded in mystery for many years. The family acknowledged that Radiguet had indeed penned these verses only after Cocteau’s death. This volume was seized by U.S. Customs on August 2, 1951, and released to the Kinsey Institute on March 1, 1958, following the Federal Court case United States v. 31 Photographs.
The Manuel de civilité, a parodic “handbook of good manners” for young girls, written by Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925) and illustrated by Martin Van Maele (1863-1926), offers indecent advice for use in educational establishments. The author mocks every institution, prescribing rules for etiquette in church, at school, or at home. Although the imprint reads Brussels, 1919 as the place and year of publication, the book was probably issued in the 1930s in Paris, since the author’s heirs only discovered his erotic manuscripts after his death in 1925. The Manuel de civilité was one of the first of numerous licentious works by Louÿs to be published clandestinely. This edition, printed in 400 copies, was reserved for subscribers and not for sale. The book was condemned in a series of trials by the Criminal Court of the Seine, France, on December 18, 1951, October 3, 1953, and May 14, 1954. The copy exhibited here (no 316) was seized by U.S. Customs in New York on April 19, 1951, and released to the Kinsey Institute on March 1, 1958, following the Federal Court case “United States v. 31 Photographs.”
Full text of Les Onze Mille Verges: https://archive.org/stream/ApollinaireLesOnzeMilleVerges/Apollinaire%20-%20Les_onze_mille_verges_djvu.txt
Digitized copy of L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1512281d
]]>[Apollinaire, Guillaume]. Les Onze Mille Verges, ou les Amours d'un hospodar, par G*** A***. Paris: En vente chez tous les libraires [Gaucher, 1907?]. Kinsey Institute Library: 843.8 A64 o5 1911
Apollinaire, Guillaume, Fernand Fleuret, and Louis Perceau. L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale. Icono-bio-bilbiographie descriptive, critique et raisonnée, complète à ce jour de tous les ouvrages composant cette célèbre collection avec un index alphabétique des titres et noms d’auteurs. Paris: Mercure de France, 1913. Lilly Library: Z5867.P2 A6
The most famous pornographic novel by the French writer Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), Les Onze Mille Verges [The Eleven Thousand Rods] recounts the shameless odyssey of the debauched aristocrat Mony Vibescu (the “Hospodar”) and his fellow rakes across the highways of Europe. Through the depiction of the unmanageable lust of the characters, the author explores the whole spectrum of human sexuality and depravity: sadism, masochism, vampirism, urophilia/undinism, scatophilia, bestiality, pedophilia (among others). The title “onze mille verges” is a nearly-homonymic pun on the Christian legend of the “onze mille vierges”—a group of holy virgins who accompanied Saint Ursula and became martyrs after being slaughtered and beheaded by the Huns. Indeed, in French, the word “verge” can refer either to a rod or to the male sexual organ. The volume exhibited here is the first edition of the novel clandestinely published in Paris by Elias Gaucher, probably in 1907. One of the most important French poets of the early twentieth century, Apollinaire was also a bibliographer who established, in collaboration with Fernand Fleuret (1883-1945) and Louis Perceau (1883-1942), the first comprehensive catalogue of L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale (1913), that is the “private case collection” of the National Library of France, where are stored all the forbidden books not accessible to the general public. In this function, Apollinaire played a decisive role in the rediscovery of licentious books from past centuries, notably the works of Sade.
Full text of Les Onze Mille Verges: https://archive.org/stream/ApollinaireLesOnzeMilleVerges/Apollinaire%20-%20Les_onze_mille_verges_djvu.txt
Digitized copy of L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1512281d
Full text: http://www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1890s/1899_the_memoirs_of_dolly_morton_(HC)/index.htm
]]>[Rebell, Hugues, attributed to]. The Memoirs of Dolly Morton. Philadelphia: Society of Private Bibliophiles [Paris: Carrington], 1904. Kinsey Institute Library: 823.7 M53 1904
First published in Paris in 1899, The Memoirs of Dolly Morton is a “flagellation novel” commonly attributed to the French writer Hugues Rebell (1867-1905), but probably written by the British publisher of erotica Charles Carrington (1867-1921) The novel takes place in the Southern United States shortly before the Civil War. It depicts the misfortunes of Quaker Dolly Morton who, in an attempt to help free the slaves, is captured by a lynch mob and coerced into becoming the mistress of a plantation owner. The book was condemned by the Criminal Court of the Seine, France, on December 3, 1914. The copy exhibited here was seized by U.S. Customs in New York on March 16, 1951, and released to the Kinsey Institute on March 1, 1958, following the Federal Court case “United States v. 31 Photographs.”
Full text: http://www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1890s/1899_the_memoirs_of_dolly_morton_(HC)/index.htm
First edition: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k10733625
Full text: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k96184843/f1n142.texteBrut
]]>Filled with debauchery, revenge, and crime mostly committed by women, the collection of six short stories Les Diaboliques [The She-Devils] by the French Catholic writer Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808-1889) was first published by Dentu in 1874. The book instantly met with tremendous success and sold out in a few days. Although the author initially planned to add six more “diabolical women” to the first six stories, he never did. Stirred up by a scathing article issued in Le Charivari, an illustrated satirical French newspaper, the Public Prosecutor put both author and publisher on trial for affront to public decency, and the remaining copies of the book were destroyed. Arguing that he sought to arouse a feeling of horror in readers through the depiction of human atrocities, Barbey avoided trial thanks to the intercession of the statesman Léon Gambetta. The edition exhibited here, which includes a portrait of the author, a frontispiece, and eight illustrations by Félicien Rops, was published by Alphonse Lemerre in 1882, a few months after the Law on the Freedom of the Press was passed in France on July 29, 1881.
First edition: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k10733625
Full text: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k96184843/f1n142.texteBrut
Full text: https://ia800503.us.archive.org/6/items/gamianiouunenuit26806gut/pg26806.txt
English translation: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.31175031173704
]]>ADM [Alfred de Musset, attributed to]. Gamiani, ou Deux nuits d’excès [1833]. Illustrations by Félicien Rops. En Hollande [Brussels: Poulet-Malassis], 1866. Kinsey Institute Library: 843.7 M98 g2 1874.
Probably the most famous French pornographic novel of the nineteenth-century, reissued more than forty times after its first publication in 1833, Gamiani, ou Deux nuits d’excès [Gamiani, or Two Nights of Excess] is commonly attributed—without conclusive evidence—to the French Romantic poet, playwright, and novelist Alfred de Musset (1810-1857). The novel recounts, over the course of two nights, the transgressive sexual experiences of Countess Gamiani, Fanny, and Alcide, including zoophilia and necrophilia. The edition exhibited here, which contains a symbolic frontispiece and four explicit illustrations by Félicien Rops, was most likely clandestinely printed for the exiled French publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis in Brussels in 1866.
Full text: https://ia800503.us.archive.org/6/items/gamianiouunenuit26806gut/pg26806.txt
English translation: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.31175031173704
Le Parnasse satyrique du dix-neuvième siècle. Recueil de vers piquants et gaillards. 2 vols. Frontispiece by Félicien Rops. Rome: À l’enseigne des sept péchés capitaux [Brussels: Poulet-Malassis], 1864. Lilly Library: PQ1181 .P256 v. 1-2.
Le Nouveau Parnasse satyrique du dix-neuvième siècle. Frontispiece by Félicien Rops. Eleutheropolis: Aux devantures des libraires [Brussels: Poulet-Malassis], 1866. Lilly Library : 6-4568.
Le Parnasse satyrique du dix-neuvième siècle. Recueil de pièces facétieuses, scatologiques, piquantes, pantagruéliques, gaillardes et satyriques. Édition augmentée et complétée. Bruxelles: Sous le manteau [Henry Kistemaeckers], 1881. Kinsey Institute Library: 841.007 P25 1881 v. 1.
Le Nouveau Parnasse satyrique du dix-neuvième siècle. Édition revue, corrigée, complétée et augmentée de nombreuses pièces nouvelles, inconnues et inédites. Frontispiece by Félicien Rops. À Bruxelles: Avec l’autorisation des compromis [Henry Kistemaeckers], 1881. Kinsey Institute Library: 841.007 P25 1881 v. 3.
Gautier, Théophile. Les Jeunes-France. Romans goguenards. Frontispiece by Félicien Rops. Amsterdam: À l’Enseigne du coq [Brussels: Poulet-Malassis], 1866. Kinsey Institute Library: 843.7 G27 j5 1866.
Le Parnasse satyrique du dix-neuvième siècle is an impressive anthology in two volumes, followed by the Nouveau Parnasse satyrique, of licentious French poetry by Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Albert Glatigny, Stéphane Mallarmé, among many other poets, on the model of the seventeenth-century Parnasse satyrique attributed to Théophile de Viau, as well as the eighteenth-century Parnasse libertin, also exhibited here. The anthology was clandestinely edited by the publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis during his exile in Belgium in 1864, probably with the complicity of Baudelaire and other poets. Several copies of the anthology were seized by French customs when Poulet-Malassis tried to smuggle them into Paris, and the publisher was sentenced in absentia by a French court on June 2, 1865. The Parnasse satyrique was the first edition in which the six condemned poems of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal were reprinted, and the second volume includes a facsimile of Baudelaire’s autograph dedication of his collection of verse to Gautier. Many reprints and new editions of the anthology were circulating in the late nineteenth century, including the expanded edition exhibited here, clandestinely printed by the Belgian publisher Henry Kistemaeckers in 1881, before it became almost forgotten in the twentieth century. Les Jeunes-France, the 1833 collection of novellas by Théophile Gautier, has little to do with the licentious anthology, but the frontispiece created by Félicien Rops for the reissue of the novel in 1866 may be considered an illustration of the Parnasse satyriques, to the extent that it represents several Romantic poets featured in the anthology, including Hugo, Musset, Gautier, and Baudelaire, gathered around a naked and lascivious muse.
This portfolio of twelve prints by Félicien Rops was bound by the Kinsey Institute in March 1951. The first prints, entitled Naturalia [Natural things], is a drypoint dating from the mid-1870s. In some states of the plate the title is specified as Naturalia non sunt Turpia [Natural things are not filthy things], in other states as Naturalia sunt Turpia [Natural things are filthy things]. At least one plate includes a quotation from Charles Baudelaire’s Paradis artificiels [Artificial Paradises]: “Les vices de l’homme, si pleins d’horreur qu’on les suppose, contiennent la preuve (quand ce ne serait que leur infinie expansion!) de son goût de l’infini” [The vices of man, however frightful they seem, contain the proof (if only in their infinite applications!) of his taste for the infinite] (transl. by Stacy Diamond). The second print is an undated etching entitled Le Ravissement de sœur Marie Alacoque [The Rapture of Sister Marie Soft-Boiled], which in some states includes this epigraph: “Deux fois par jour, les anges venaient la visiter et lui causaient mille ravissements. — Comment sont-ils faits? lui demanda la sœur supérieure. — Leurs membres sont comme ceux des hommes, répondit sœur Marie” [Twice a day, the angels came to visit her and gave her a thousand delights. – What are they like? asked the Sister Superior. - Their members are like those of men, said Sister Marie]. The third print is an undated etching entitled Hypocrisie, and the fourth print is an untitled and undated etching.
Rops, Félicien. Satan semant l’ivraie (1882). Heliogravure. Kinsey Institute Library: 366Q R7857.4.
Rops, Félicien. Le Calvaire (1882). Heliogravure. Kinsey Institute Library: 366Q R7857.7.
Rops, Félicien. L’Idole (1882). Heliogravure. Kinsey Institute Library: 366Q R7857.5.
Rops, Félicien. Le Sacrifice (1882). Heliogravure. Kinsey Institute Library: 366Q R7587.6.
The four sacrilegious engravings exhibited here, Satan semant l’ivraie [Satan sowing darnel], Le Calvaire [The Calvary], L’Idole [The Idol], and Le Sacrifice [The Sacrifice], are part of a series of five heliogravures (“a process of engraving by means of the action of light on a sensitized surface” [OED]), titled Les Sataniques [The Satanic Ones] and composed by the Belgian symbolist engraver Félicien Rops (1833-1898) between 1881 and 1882. Les Sataniques were meant to be part of L’Album du Diable [The Devil’s Scrapbook], an ambitious artist’s book project aimed at combining texts and illustrations, which was never completed.
[Lepoittevin, Eugène]. Charges et Décharges diaboliques. [Paris: Guerrier, 1830]. Kinsey Institute Library: 710 L593c.
The anonymous portfolio of twelve obscene lithographs Charges et Décharges diaboliques, printed in Paris around 1830, was assembled by the French painter and caricaturist Eugène Lepoittevin (1806-1870), a contributor for Charles Philipon’s famous journal La Caricature, and the creator of the series Diableries (devilish prints). These satirical lithographs depict a series of explicitly sexual postures and assaults (charges) carried out by diabolical characters. The portfolio was seized by U.S. Customs in New York on August 2, 1951, and released to the Kinsey Institute on March 1, 1958, following the Federal Court case United States v. 31 Photographs.
First edition of Les Fleurs du Mal: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1057740n
Documents on the trial of Les Fleurs du Mal: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Documents_sur_le_proc%C3%A8s_des_Fleurs_du_mal
Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal. Paris: Poulet-Malassis et De Broise, 1857. Lilly Library: PQ2191 .F6 1857.
Les Épaves de Charles Baudelaire. Avec une eau-forte frontispice de Félicien Rops. Amsterdam: à l’enseigne du Coq [Brussels: Poulet-Malassis], 1866. Kinsey Institute Library (late reprint): 841.7 B33 e6 1874.
Baudelaire, Charles. Les Pièces condamnées. Édition ornée de 12 gravures sur bois de Daragnès. Paris: Leharanger-Coq, 1917. Kinsey Institute Library: AAF4967.
Currently the most revered and studied collection of French lyric poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal [The Flowers of Evil] by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) was the subject of one of the most famous literary trials in France. On August 20, 1857, a few weeks after publication of the collection by Poulet-Malassis, six poems from Les Fleurs du Mal were indicted by the Tribunal correctionnel [criminal court] of the Seine for affront to public decency (“outrage à la morale publique”) because of their alleged “crude realism”: “Les Bijoux” [The Jewels], “Le Léthé”, “Femmes damnées” [Damned Women], “Les Métamorphoses d’un vampire,” “À celle qui est trop gaie” [To a Woman too Gay], and “Lesbos” (the last two reproduced here with translations by Samuel N. Rosenberg). These erotic, sometimes lesbian poems were then excluded from all regular editions of Les Fleurs du Mal until the rehabilitation of Baudelaire and his collection by the Cour de cassation [court of appeals] in 1949. The condemned poems nevertheless continued to be widely circulated through clandestine and often illustrated editions, including Le Parnasse satyrique (1864), Les Épaves [The Wrecks] with a frontispiece by Félicien Rops (1866), Les Pièces condamnées [Condemned Pieces] with woodcuts by Jean Gabriel Daragnès (1917), all exhibited here.
First edition of Les Fleurs du Mal: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1057740n
Documents on the trial of Les Fleurs du Mal: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Documents_sur_le_proc%C3%A8s_des_Fleurs_du_mal
First edition: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k10400891
Sade, Donatien Alphonse François de. Les Crimes de l’amour: Nouvelles héroïques et tragiques. 4 vols. Paris: Massé, an VIII [1800]. Kinsey Institute Library: 843.6 S12 c9 1800.
The eleven “Heroic and tragic tales” collected in the four illustrated volumes of The Crimes of Love, legally published in the year VIII of the French revolutionary calendar (1800), are far less transgressive than Sade’s other novels, such as Justine and Juliette. In the first volume of The Crimes of Love, exhibited here, the tales are preceded by an essay bearing the title “An Idea about Novels,” in which the author roughly survey the history of fiction in order to justify the supposed morality of his own novels. In this essay, Sade falsely denies being the author of Justine, which, since its first clandestine publication in 1791, has rightly been attributed to him. The quotation on the title page is an unfaithful adaptation of a translation of The Complaint, or Night Thoughts (1742-45) by Edward Young. Sade’s version may be translated as “Love, delicious fruit that Heaven allows earth to produce for happiness in life, why must you create crimes? and why does man abuse everything?”
First edition: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k10400891
First edition: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k15176835
Le Parnasse libertin, ou Recueil de poésies libres. Paillardisoropolis [Paris?]: Chez le Dru, à l’enseigne de Priape, 1772. Kinsey Institute Library: 841.005 P25 1772.
The eighteenth-century anthology of French licentious poetry Le Parnasse libertin consists of 150 songs, tales, and epigrams, in part attributed to Jean de La Fontaine, Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, the abbé de Chaulieu, Piron, and Voltaire, among others, and for the most part (85 poems) anonymous. Anthologies of erotic poetry were widely circulated in France, at least from the Parnasse des poètes satyriques attributed to Théophile de Viau, who was imprisoned and sentenced to death after its publication in 1622, until the late nineteenth-century Parnasse satyrique du dix-neuvième siècle, also exhibited here.
First edition: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k15176835
Full text: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25305/pg25305.txt
Text of Attorney General of Massachusetts v. A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure": http://masscases.com/cases/sjc/349/349mass69.html
Text of Memoirs v. Massachussets: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/383/413/
]]>[Cleland, John], Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. 2 vols. London: printed [by Thomas Parker] for G. Fenton [Fenton & Ralph Griffiths] in the Strand, 1749. Lilly Library: HQ461.C62 M53 v.2.
John Cleland (1709-89) wrote Fanny Hill, which is considered the first English pornographic novel (in the etymological sense of pornography: writing about prostitutes) and whose original title is Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, in Fleet Prison in London in 1748. The novel, consisting of two letters addressed by the fictional character Frances “Fanny” Hill to a “Madam,” recounts in vivid and explicit detail Fanny’s transgressive sexual experiences from her adolescence through her middle age. According to Peter Sabor, “the rare first edition of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure contains an important two-paragraph description of a male homosexual encounter deleted from all subsequent editions, including the modern paperbacks” (Censorship, 2121). This novel was perhaps the most heavily challenged book in court, in both England and the United States, since its first edition was censored and the author and publisher arrested by the duke of Newcastle in November 1749, until the landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Memoirs v. Massachusetts (383 U.S. 413) in March 1966, which lifted the ban imposed by the Attorney General of Massachusetts on the first unabridged edition of Fanny Hill published in the United States by Putnam in 1963. In his concurring opinion, Justice William O. Douglas declared: “As I read the First Amendment, judges cannot gear the literary diet of an entire nation to whatever tepid stuff is incapable of triggering the most demented mind. The First Amendment demands more than a horrible example or two of the perpetrator of a crime of sexual violence, in whose pocket is found a pornographic book, before it allows the Nation to be saddled with a regime of censorship.”
Full text: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25305/pg25305.txt
Text of Attorney General of Massachusetts v. A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure": http://masscases.com/cases/sjc/349/349mass69.html
Text of Memoirs v. Massachussets: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/383/413/
First edition: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k15135432
Full text of the 1910 edition: https://archive.org/stream/thresephilosop00arge/thresephilosop00arge_djvu.txt
]]>[Argens, Jean-Baptiste de Boyer d’(?)]. Thérèse philosophe, ou Mémoires pour servir à l’hi[s]toire du P[ère] Dirrag et de Mademoiselle Éradice. La Haye, 186... [Bruxelles: Poulet-Malassis, c1865]. Kinsey Institute Library: 843.6 A68 t3 1865.
One of the most popular French libertine novels of the eighteenth-century, Thérèse philosophe [Therese the philosopher], first published in 1748 and continually reprinted thereafter, is an erotic version of a roman philosophique [philosophical novel], in which fictional characters discuss ethical and metaphysical questions, as in works by Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others. The philosophical dimension is not absent in Thérèse philosophe, which notably deals with the question of atheism; this soon gives way, however, to obscene or pornographic themes. The novel nevertheless contains social criticism concerning the sexual oppression of women and the abuse of religious authority (the young protagonist Therese having been confined in a convent against her will). The copy here exhibited, clandestinely published by Auguste Poulet-Malassis in Belgium around 1865, includes twenty eighteenth-century engravings attributed to Antoine Borel (1743-1810).
First edition: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k15135432
Full text of the 1910 edition: https://archive.org/stream/thresephilosop00arge/thresephilosop00arge_djvu.txt
First edition: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8601526t
English translation: https://archive.org/details/TheSchoolOfVenusOrTheLadiesDelightReducedIntoRulesOfPractice/page/n19
]]>L’Escole des filles de Militot. Réimpression complète du texte original sur la contrefaçon hollandaise de 1660. Frontispiece by Félicien Rops. Bruxelles: Aux dépens des dames de la rue des Cailles [Poulet-Malassis, 1865]. Kinsey Institute Library: 843.5 M65 e2 1865.
Considered the first French libertine novel of the seventeenth century, L'École des filles [The School for Girls], whose author is unknown, was published in Paris in 1655. The narrative recounts the sexual initiation of the young female character Franchon, through two dialogues with her cousin Susanne and a sexual relationship with the male character Robinet [faucet]. Michel Millot, the first publisher of the book, was put on trial and the book burned in Paris on August 9, 1655. A first English translation of the novel was clandestinely published in 1680, under the title The School of Venus, or the Ladies Delight, Reduced into Rules of Practice. The novel was not legally published, in either France or the United States, until the twentieth century.
First edition: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8601526t
English translation: https://archive.org/details/TheSchoolOfVenusOrTheLadiesDelightReducedIntoRulesOfPractice/page/n19
First edition: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1040628d
]]>Sade, Donatien Alphonse François de. Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du vice. 6 vols. En Hollande, 1797 [Bruxelles: Poulet-Malassis or Gay (?), c1865-1870]. Kinsey Institute Library: missing.
The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), undoubtedly the most controversial French writer to date, spent most of his adult life in prison, because of his sexual and violent behavior, as well as the sexual and violent mores depicted in his books (hence the word sadism), including The 120 Days of Sodom (1785) and Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795). The Story of Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded, published in 1800 while Sade was enjoying temporary freedom during the French Revolution, is the continuation of Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (1791), considered the antithesis of Samuel Richardson’s moral novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740). While young and innocent Justine is repeatedly sexually abused and assaulted in her pursuit of virtue, her older and depraved sister Juliette is always happily rewarded after committing serial murders and other crimes. After the anonymous publication of both novels, under the title La Nouvelle Justine, in ten volumes illustrated with a hundred explicit engravings in 1799-1800, Sade was arrested by order of Napoleon in 1801 and imprisoned in the asylum of Charenton, where died thirteen years later. The publication of Sade’s works, one of the most radical literary experiments, was prohibited in France until 1957 (even if illegal editions, including the one exhibited here, had been widely circulated since the 18th century), when the publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert was acquitted of the charge of “outrage aux bonnes mœurs” [affront to public decency] for publishing Sade’s novels. These works, though still controversial, are now part of the French literary canon. The first American paperback edition of Juliette was published by Grove Press in 1968. The couplet on the title page of the French original edition, attributed to Petronius, states that “On n’est point criminel pour faire la peinture / Des bizarres penchans qu’inspire la nature” [A man is hardly a criminal for depicting the bizarre inclinations inspired by nature].
First edition: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1040628d
[Verlaine, Paul]. Les Amies: Sonnets, par le licencié Pablo de Herlagnez. Segovie [Brussels: Poulet-Malassis], 1868. Lilly Library: PQ2463 .A74 1868.
Verlaine, Paul. Les Amies: Sonnets. Illustrated by Jean Gabriel Daragnès. Bayonne: À l’enseigne de la Guirlande [Paris: Daragnès], 1919. Kinsey Institute Library: 841.7 V52 a5 1919.
The collection of six Sapphic sonnets Les Amies [Girlfriends], composed by Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) under the pseudonym Pablo de Herlagnez, was clandestinely printed in Brussels by Poulet-Malassis in December 1867. Several copies of the booklet were seized by French customs while the publisher was trying to smuggle them into Paris at the beginning of 1868, and the Tribunal Correctionnel (Criminal Court) of Lille ordered the destruction of the collection, on May 6, 1868, for affront to religion and public decency (see the September 19 issue of Le Moniteur universel. Journal official de l’Empire français). The collection Les Amies was anonymously illustrated and reissued by the artist and art publisher Jean Gabriel Daragnès (1886-1950) in 1919. The poem “Sappho,” exhibited here and translated by Samuel N. Rosenberg, has the particularity of being an inverted sonnet, that is, a pseudo-sonnet, exclusively composed of feminine rhymes like the other sonnets of the volume, in which the order of the quatrains and the tercets is reversed, to underline the lesbian theme of the collection.
Verlaine, Paul. Femmes. Imprimé sous le manteau et ne se vend nulle part [Brussels: Kistemaeckers], 1890. Lilly Library: PQ2463 .F329.
Verlaine, Paul. Chair (dernières poésies). Paris: Bibliothèque Artistique & Littéraire, 1896. Lilly Library: PQ2463 .C434.
Verlaine, Paul. “Hombres” (hommes). Imprimé sous le manteau et ne se vend nulle part [Paris: Messein, 1904]. Lilly Library: PQ2463 .H764.
In the last years of his life, Paul Verlaine (1844-96) mainly composed erotic poems, some of which mildly sensual, like those included in the posthumous collection Chair [Flesh], illustrated with a frontispiece by Félicien Rops, others downright obscene, like those included in the pornographic (in the etymological sense of pornography: writing about prostitutes) collection Femmes [Women] and the homoerotic collection Hombres [Men], clandestinely printed, the former in 1890 and the latter in 1904. Hombres ends with a sonnet composed in collaboration with Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) in 1872, Le Sonnet du trou du cul [Sonnet on the asshole], translated here by Samuel N. Rosenberg. According to Verlaine, he himself composed the quatrains (Verlaine fecit) and his younger lover composed the tercets (Rimbaud invenit).
One of the most famous and controversial novels of the twentieth-century, Lolita by the Russian-born American writer Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) is presented as prison confession of the protagonist Humbert Humbert, who recounts his pedophilic attraction for twelve-year old Lolita and their subsequent “affair.” First published in Paris by Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press in 1955, the book was banned by the French government a year later, on December 10, 1956. The first U.S. edition of the novel, published by Putnam in August 1958, ranked it among the bestselling novels of all time, with 100,000 copies sold in the first three weeks, and more than 50 million copies sold worldwide since then. Despite its lasting impact on popular culture (the word “Lolita” has turned into a common noun, listed in most dictionaries to designate “a precociously seductive girl” [Merriam-Webster]), the novel has become more controversial than ever in recent years because of its subject matter.
The Institute was thus forced to take the case to court, an expensive and time consuming process. With the cooperation of the prosecutors for the Southern District of New York, and the New York Customs officials, Kinsey’s lawyers set up a “test case” designed to determine whether it was legal for scholars and researchers to import materials that would be considered obscene in other contexts. For the case, Kinsey purposefully ordered the most openly erotic books and photographs he could find. In addition to the 31 photographs for which the case was named, there were Raymond Radiguet's Vers Libres (1926), Eugène-Modeste-Edmond Lepoittevin’s Charges et Décharges Diaboliques (1830) Pierre Louÿs' Manuel de Civilité (1917), The Memoirs of Dolly Morton (1899), (all included in this exhibition), as well as some “lavatory wall inscriptions” from London, six Chinese paintings and several other plaques and engravings.
The case, officially known as United States of America v. 31 Photographs 4-3/4 by 7 Inches in Size and Various Pictures Books and Other Articlesdidn’t reach the court until July of 1957, nearly a year after Kinsey’s death, which meant that he never got to celebrate the landmark decision that codified in law the “principle that the subject matter of objective scholarly inquiry is not an object of federal prohibition” (Harriet Pilpel).
On October 31, 1957, Judge Edmund L. Palmieri ruled that the materials were not, by definition, “obscene” if they were in the hands of scientific researchers. Just as a naked body is not obscene in a medical textbook but would be if “wantonly exposed in the open market,” pornography is not obscene in the hands of a scientist. Although the Judge cited many other cases as precedent for his ruling, it was truly groundbreaking, and an undeniable victory for the Kinsey Institute and for sex researchers more broadly. It not only protected the library, archive, and artifact collections, it protected all of the interviews and data collected by Kinsey and his colleagues. The security of the data and the library was a large part of why the Institute had been founded in the first place, and with the 1957 ruling that goal was achieved.
]]>The Kinsey Institute, then called the Institute for Sex Research, began having trouble with customs as early as 1947, the same year it was founded. At issue was the “Smoot-Hawley” Tariff act (1930), which prohibited the importation of any “obscene” or “immoral” material. When the customs office in Indianapolis first seized materials intended for the Institute’s “sex library,” Alfred C. Kinsey and his colleagues initially worked out an agreement with one Indianapolis official, who would ignore shipments directed to the Institute. Because it was so informal, however, Kinsey’s lawyers tried to get an “administrative exception” from the Customs Bureau in Washington, on the grounds that there is an exemption in the Tariff act for works of scientific or literary merit. Washington procrastinated for years before formally denying the request.
The Institute was thus forced to take the case to court, an expensive and time consuming process. With the cooperation of the prosecutors for the Southern District of New York, and the New York Customs officials, Kinsey’s lawyers set up a “test case” designed to determine whether it was legal for scholars and researchers to import materials that would be considered obscene in other contexts. For the case, Kinsey purposefully ordered the most openly erotic books and photographs he could find. In addition to the 31 photographs for which the case was named, there were Raymond Radiguet's Vers Libres (1926), Eugène-Modeste-Edmond Lepoittevin’s Charges et Décharges Diaboliques (1830) Pierre Louÿs' Manuel de Civilité (1917), The Memoirs of Dolly Morton (1899), (all included in this exhibition), as well as some “lavatory wall inscriptions” from London, six Chinese paintings and several other plaques and engravings.
The case, officially known as United States of America v. 31 Photographs 4-3/4 by 7 Inches in Size and Various Pictures Books and Other Articlesdidn’t reach the court until July of 1957, nearly a year after Kinsey’s death, which meant that he never got to celebrate the landmark decision that codified in law the “principle that the subject matter of objective scholarly inquiry is not an object of federal prohibition” (Harriet Pilpel).
On October 31, 1957, Judge Edmund L. Palmieri ruled that the materials were not, by definition, “obscene” if they were in the hands of scientific researchers. Just as a naked body is not obscene in a medical textbook but would be if “wantonly exposed in the open market,” pornography is not obscene in the hands of a scientist. Although the Judge cited many other cases as precedent for his ruling, it was truly groundbreaking, and an undeniable victory for the Kinsey Institute and for sex researchers more broadly. It not only protected the library, archive, and artifact collections, it protected all of the interviews and data collected by Kinsey and his colleagues. The security of the data and the library was a large part of why the Institute had been founded in the first place, and with the 1957 ruling that goal was achieved.
Obscenity laws that restrict the circulation of materials (mostly books, images, and films) deemed obscene—and therefore not protected by the First Amendment—have been established at the state and federal levels in the United States since the 19th century. Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, led a successful campaign to have the U.S. Congress pass the “Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use” on March 3, 1873. Known as the “Comstock Act,” it prohibited the possession and circulation of “any obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing or other representation, figure, or image on or of paper or other material, or any cast, instrument, or other article of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine, or any article whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion.” This law drew on the test for obscenity provided in the English case Regina v. Hicklin (1868): “Whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” All materials fitting this description could therefore be subject to prosecution and destruction. The Hicklin test for obscenity remained in force in the United States until John M. Woolsey, a federal trial judge in New York, decided in United States vs. One Book Called Ulysses (1933) that “where a book is claimed to be obscene it must first be determined, whether the intent with which it was written was what is called, according to the usual phrase, pornographic.” The judge acknowledged James Joyce’s intention, in writing Ulysses, to “make a serious experiment in a new […] literary genre,” which prevented the book from being considered obscene. The recognition of the social and aesthetic merits of a work as qualities that make it immune from charges of obscenity was then confirmed in the Supreme Court case Roth v. United States (1957), when Justice William J. Brennan established a new standard for classifying materials as obscene: “Whether, to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest,” provided that said material is “utterly without redeeming social importance.” This new standard was tested two years later, following the publication by Grove Press of an unexpurgated edition of D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was seized by the U.S. Post Office on the basis of the Comstock Act. The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the publisher on March 26, 1960, declaring that Lady Chatterley’s Lover “is a major and a distinguished novel, and Lawrence one of the great writers of the era” (Grove Press v. Christenberry). A remarkable feature of the new test for obscenity—and all its progeny—is that it requires a judge or jury to decide on the literary or artistic merits of a work, and therefore to play the role of a literary or art critic. In general, the judgment of obscenity remained eminently subjective, as evidenced by Justice Potter Stewart’s famous statement about “hard-core pornography” in Jacobellis v. Ohio in 1964: “I know it when I see it.” The test of “redeeming social value” sufficient to clear a work from charges of obscenity was confirmed in Memoirs v. Massachusetts in 1966, when Justice William O. Douglas concluded that John Cleland’s Fanny Hill “cannot be held to be obscene in view of substantial evidence showing that it has literary, historical, and social importance.” The standard of minimal social value established in Roth v. United States, according to which virtually no materials could be deemed obscene, was then revised in Miller v. California in 1973: “Whether the work as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” (our emphasis). This revised standard is part of the three-prong test that is still used today in the United States to determine whether materials are legally obscene: “If, taken as a whole the material (1) appeals to the prurient interest in sex, as determined by the average person applying contemporary community standards; (2) portrays sexual conduct, as specifically defined by the applicable state law, in a patently offensive way; and (3) lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” (Black’s Law Dictionary, 10th edition, 2014).