W. H. The Platonic Blow.

by AUDEN

£250 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

Pirated Auden Erotica in America AUDEN, W. H. The Platonic Blow. New York: Fuck You Press. 1965. 4to. Original printed wrappers, stapled as issued; pp. [12]; slight toning to spine, small ink-stain to rear wrapper; else a very good copy. First separate edition, one of 300 trade copies, of Auden’s erotic poem detailing a spontaneous sexual encounter with a twenty-four-year-old mechanic, written in 1948 and issued in the same year as its pirated first appearance in print in Ed Sanders’s Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts in March. Sanders allegedly obtained a copy of the typescript from an employee of the Morgan Library, reproducing it in vol. 5, no. 8, of the magazine of the Fuck You Press without Auden’s permission (under the title ‘The Gobble Poem’), with cover illustrations by Andy Warhol. This edition was ‘designed published, zapped and ejaculated by two legendary editors poets’ at the Fuck You Press for the ‘Dietrich von Buttfükel World Gobble Grope Fellowship’. In addition to the present trade edition, the final page also advertises ‘a Rough Trade Edition of 5 numbered copies, each with beautiful slurp drawings’ by Joe Brainard; ‘an edition of 3 numbered copies, each with a sealed packet sewn in, containing secret gobble relics from the body of W. H. Auden’; and a ‘Turkey Edition’ of two copies, revealing ‘the names of the publishers, both evil young poets, Toe Queens, cocksmen, scandalously freaking in the Lower East Side’. Bloomfield Mendelson, pp. 366–67. SKU: 2124854

• Binding: Hardcover

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