REAGE, Pauline [pseudonym for Anne DESCLOS]. Histoire d'O. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert. 1954.
8vo. Original cream card wraps with black lettering; together in the original publisher's glassine wrapper; pages untrimmed and partially unopened, pp. [6], i-xx, [2], 245, [3]; slight chipping and nicking to glassine, and larger tear to lower cover; else a near-fine copy.
First French Edition numbered 155/600 with a preface by Jean Paulhan - the writer, critic and publisher responsible for the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Francaise
When Jean Paulhan, an ardent admirer of the Marquis de Sade and the writer of this edition's preface "Du Bonheur Dans L'Esclavage" (The Happiness in Slavery), argued it implausible that any woman be capable of writing an erotic novel, his lover set out to produce the book that preceded Fifty Shades of Grey . Histoire D'O (Story of O) was written by Anne Desclos, a French journalist and translater, under the pseudonym Pauline Reage- a woman who would only reveal her secret in 1994, forty years after this edition was published, in an interview with The New Yorker.
The bestseller not only came to great commercial success; in 1955 it was awarded the French Literature Prize Prix des Deux Magots. Its sadomasochistic themes of graphic female submission caused widespread controversy and in 1959 the govenrment brought obscenity charges against it which were later rebuked in court. Graham Greene would encompass it as such, "'A rare thing, a pornographic book well written and without a trace of obscenity".
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