Les Chanson de Bilitis [Songs of Bilitis]

Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1898. Limited Edition. Leather Bound. Very Good. 336pp. Octavo [23 cm] Rebound in 3/4 red leather with marbled paper over boards, with a decorative gilt stamped spine and a gilt stamped green leather spine label. Top edge gilt. New endpapers and flyleaves supplied at the time of binding. Frontispiece portrait of Bilitis by P. Albert Laurens after a bust in the Musée du Louvre. Subtle fading to the spine. Light rubbing to the extremities. Subtle sunning to the spine. Discreet binder's mark on the verso of the front free endpaper. Pages lightly foxed. A handful of the pages trimmed short along the fore-edge. Text in French. A collection of erotic poems by Pierre Louys. Louys fraudulently claimed that the poems had been translated from Greek. Bilitis refers to a female character who was romantically involved with Sappho, the female Greek lyric poet.

Number 497 in an edition of 550 originally bound in vellum (this copy has been rebound), and numbered 60 to 609.