Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

LANCLOS, Choderlos de. Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Paris, The Black Sun Press, 1929.

One of the original 1020 copies of Lanclos’s libertine novel, translated by Ernest Dowson, the first edition with fourteen full plate illustrations by the German artist Alastair.

A beautiful production by the Black Sun Press in two volumes, the text in English, and illustrated throughout by Alastair. Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a classic French epistolary novel written in the late eighteenth century, in which two wealthy and depraved aristocrats exchange boasts about seducing and manipulating their victims in a series of sexual scandals (think Cruel Intentions). It is often cited as an example of the great decadence of the Ancien regime before the French Revolution.

The Black Sun Press was an English-language publishing house based in Paris. Founded in 1927 by American expatriates Harry and Caresse Crosby, it published the early works of influential literary figures such as Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Crane, D. H. Lawrence, and Hemingway. The books, all handset, were typographically impeccable and beautifully bound. The Black Sun Press closed in 1970, following Caresse Crosby’s death.

2 vols, folio, pp. I: 276; II: 262, all edges rough trim; a clean copy in the original printed wrappers with fold-over flaps (small traces of tape to free endpapers, head and tail of spines slightly chipped).

Minkoff A-31.