BAUDELAIRE, Charles.

£27,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Les Fleurs du mal. First edition, first issue, of the author's legendary collection, containing six "sordid poems" censored six weeks after publication: out of the small print run of 1,300 copies, at least 200 were seized by French authorities. The poems were not reprinted until 1866, in the Belgian volume Les Épaves, and remained illegal in France until 1949.For causing an "outrage to public decency", Baudelaire and his publisher were forced to suppress the poems and pay a fine. Baudelaire himself hid several copies from the censors, personally retrieving 50 copies deposited with the bookseller Lanier, leaving another 50 to feed "le Cerbère Justice".The collection was powerfully influential on the symbolist and modernist movements, and on Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé in particular; on reading the poem "Le Cygne", Victor Hugo wrote that Baudelaire had created "un nouveau frisson" in literature.This copy has the correct points for the first issue: the misprint "Feurs" for "Fleurs" in the running title on pages 31 and 108, page 45 misnumbered 44, and the misprint "captieux" for "capiteux" on page 201. It is finely bound by the Parisian bookseller Franz Ostermann (1839-1938), stamp-signed "Franz" on the foot of the front turn-in. The original wrappers, in the third state priced 3 francs and with five errors corrected, are bound in at the rear.

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