Description
3 vols., 8vo, pp. 191, [1]; 203, [3]; 223, [1]. Original wrappers printed in green and black. A little soiling to textblock edges. A touch of rubbing to extremities, spines slightly creased, nick to fore-edge of front wrapper of vol. 3.
The 120 Days of Sodom or The Romance of the School for Libertinage. Being an English Rendering of Les 120 Journées de Sodome done by Pieralessandro Casavini, with an Essay by Georges Bataille.
- Paris: The Traveller's Companion Series published by The Olympia Press 1962
£75
Notes
de Sade's novel, a notoriously sexually-explicit satire of French society through an exhaustive and detailed catalogue of the depravity of a nobleman, a bishop, a judge and a banker, was composed in 1785 but the manuscript was lost following the 1789 storming of the Bastille and was not printed until 1905. This translation - the first into English - was done by a pseudonymous Austryn Wainhouse and first published in 1954; this is its third edition and second in the Traveller's Companion series. Wainhouse had translated de Sade's Justine and would later translate Pauline Reage's Story of O, both for Maurice Girodias.
