First Edition. Les 120 Journees de Sodome ou L’Ecole du Libertinage

Paris, 1904. First Edition. (Paris: Club des Bibliophiles 1904). This is the extremely rare first edition of the masterpiece of the infamous libertine the Marquis de Sade. The original wrappers bound-in. Contemporary pink buckram (with some light damp-staining). # 106 of a Limited Edition of only 200 copies. De Sade's tale has been called: "the most impure tale that has ever been written since the world exists." Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Russell (1740-1814) wrote his 120 Journees de Sodome in 1785 while imprisoned in the Bastille. The manuscript was assumed lost during the storming of the Bastille in 1789, but it was subsequently found hidden and fully preserved in de Sade's cell in the Bastille. At the end of the nineteenth century the manuscript was acquired by Sade's first biographer, a German psychiatrist named Iwan Bloch, who had it privately printed in this edition in 1904. The original manuscript is preserved at the Bodmer Library in Geneva. Rare.