Rare Book Monthly
Articles - October - 2003 Issue
Book Lust and the Cultural Erotics of Fine Printing
"The Reader of Novels," painted by Belgian artist Antonie Wiertz, 1853
And by attributing to books an exaggerated femininity, bibliophiles not only safeguarded but inflated their own manliness. This was important. Beneath the postures of conventional Victorian heterosexuality often lay more complicated and ambiguous impulses. Even at the end of the century homosexuality was a legally and socially unacceptable “perversion,” as Oscar Wilde’s famous downfall demonstrated. Therefore it would be naïve to take the emphatically heterosexual tone of book love simply at face value. By rendering books’ bodies “feminine” while preserving the “masculine” nature of their content, many bibliophiles were able to channel desire for other men into conventionally safe, stereotypically heterosexual terms.
The fine book emerged at precisely this time. The fine editions that savvy authors, artists, printers, and publishers produced were often subtly eroticized as feminine objects intended for the elite community of male book collectors. Most shrewdly representative are the books published by the Bodley Head, an innovative London publishing firm founded in the early 90s, which quickly became notorious for publishing the era’s leading aesthetic and decadent writers, including Oscar Wilde. Bodley Head books were no less famous for their material forms. They are invariably described in feminized terms: slender, charming, lovely, sumptuous. Issued in editions often expressly limited, many Bodley Head books were printed on rag and sometimes handmade papers, complete with watermarks and deckle edges denoting preindustrial “fine” bookmaking. They could hardly have been more unlike the century’s standard fiction format, the stout and sturdy three-decker novel. Late-century fine books like those from the Bodley Head offered private, intense moments of exquisite aesthetic experience with an overtly sensual appeal.
The erotic undercurrents of that experience began with the bindings. A leather binding was naturally likened to a book’s skin. Ornamental tooling patterns took on exotic meanings when described as “tattoos,” echoing the erotic intrigue late in the century for the pierced, tattooed bodies of Eastern, Indian, and African women. These decorated books corresponded to the era’s literary vogue for novels set in ancient or fantastical civilizations and featuring a powerful and seductive pagan woman. Flaubert’s novel Salammbô, Wilde’s play Salome, Pierre Louÿs’s pseudo-Greek tales of Aphrodite, and similar works incited a spate of ornate, even opulent, illustrated editions through the early decades of the twentieth century.
Varying colors, textures and grades of leather suggested exotic, sensual themes. One bibliophile relished the prospect of “re-forming his harem”—selling books he had tired of and buying others. “Good-bye, ladies!” he sang. “Spanish girls will take the place of Circassians, [and] negresses of the Congo will replace the fair English.” Here various leathers translate into an imperialist collection of exotic mistresses. The erotic allure of these racially and culturally Other women is graphically clear in a bookplate of the era that depicts four women—a European, an African, an Asian, and a Middle Eastern—dancing around a huge phallus on a pedestal. Each corresponds with a luxurious element of fine bookmaking: English, Niger, and morocco leathers, as well as Japan Vellum, a prized kind of handmade paper.
For Wilde and other Bodley Head authors, however, nudity per se was less interesting than layers of beguiling ornament. Several Bodley Head editions were dressed in ornately decorative bindings, vividly colored cloths stamped in gold. Aubrey Beardsley’s original binding design for the 1894 Bodley Head edition of Wilde’s Salome, for example, featured this lush pattern of undulating, sinewy flowerlike peacock feathers to be stamped in rich gilt.
