Le Joujou Des Demoiselles. Avec De Nouvelles Gravures. Nouvelle Edition AugmentéE [Jouffreau De Lazarie, Abbé?] Art & Architecture,Illustrated

THE ‘PLAYTHING OF WOMEN’, WITH 56 HAND-COLORED ENGRAVINGS. Tall 4to. Entirely engraved throughout, comprising title-page, 50 numbered plates, and 5 further plates. Contemporary yap-edged vellum, tooled in black. Colored throughout by a delicate, probably contemporary hand. Sole edition as such of this extraordinary work of eroticism, titled ‘The Plaything of Women’. Intended (according to the 20th century editor Apollinaire) for a female audience, the work explores – visually and textually – various titillating and romantic scenarios in a bawdy light. The Moniteur of 1815 ordered the destruction of all copies of the Joujou des Demoiselles on the 19th May of that year. Various editions are known, all published under false imprints; the present edition has no imprint at all, and the ‘nouvelles gravures’ promised on the title-page in fact prove to be far more explicit than any other edition. The more common ‘Londres’ editions of 1753 and 1758 were wholly unillustrated. There exists an undated engraved version without the ‘Nouvelles Gravures’, which proves to contain tame vignettes of a pastoral nature (eg, a ship on the horizon to illustrate ‘The Chambermaid’; gothic ruins to illustrate ‘A Woman of Good Appetite’); and finally, there is the present, ‘X-Rated’ version which contains dozens of terrifically explicit vignettes: "Women who are [ridden] like donkeys"; "A Remedy for Hemorrhoids"; "On Women who Show Their Breasts"; etc. etc. It is difficult to believe that even the most Enlightened abbé would have spawned such a production, and we believe that further research into the text and the circumstances of its publication may be warranted. Vera Salomons’ catalog of the works of Charles Eisen attributes both sets of engravings to that artist: "this issue is on large paper, namely, small 4to, and is very scarce" (p. 113). OCLC shows no complete US copy of the ‘Nouvelles Gravures’ edition; the UCLA copy contains just 46 leaves, and the Redwood Athenaeum copy just 54 leaves. * Catalogue des Ecrits, Gravures et Dessins condamnés depuis 1814 jusqu'au 1er janvier 1850, p. 108; Gay, Bibliographie des ouvrages relatifs a? l'amour (3rd ed), p. 184-185; Bealu, La Poésie Érotique (1971), p. 199.