1911 Les Chansons de Bilitis

Description

Colour Plates, Illustrated, Leather Binding, Rebound

Bound in a half morocco binding with marbled paper boards.

Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925), was a French poet and novelist known for his sensual, often erotic themes rooted in classical antiquity.

Illustrated with 300 in-text engravings, and 24 colour plates. 

This work contains 143 prose poems divided into three sections, Bucolics in Pamphylia, Elegies at Mytilene, and Epigrams in the Tomb. Louÿs presented the book as a translation of newly discovered Greek poems by a courtesan named Bilitis, a supposed contemporary of Sappho. In reality, Bilitis was entirely fictional; Louÿs wrote the poems himself in prose-poem form.

To lend authenticity to the forgery, Louÿs in the index listed some poems as "untranslated"; he even craftily fabricated an entire section of his book called "The Life of Bilitis", crediting a certain fictional archaeologist, Herr G. Heim, as the discoverer of Bilitis's tomb.