BAWDY TALES AND TRIFLES OF DEVILRIES FOR LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF EXPERIENCE

Bawdy Tales is a complete collection of renowned illustrator Eugene Lepoittevin's absurdly funny devil dicks drawings, created in the early 1800s in France for wealthy aristocrats, for their private amusements.

Lepoittevin's Devils first appeared to acclaim in 1832. Originally, his devil was an impish troublemaker. At the behest of his publisher, he created a new series of lithographs featuring his devils ala erotique. The drawings are more humorous than titillating and reflect the sense of absurdity prevalent in European eroticism. Even so, the drawings were long banned in Europe and the United States, with the government going so far as to confiscate copies intended for the Kinsey Institute in 1956.

The selection of writings is culled from humorous erotic pastiches and rare writing privately printed for exclusive collectors by underground publishers that have long been hidden in the Private Case of the British Library and the L'Enfer of the Biblioteque nationale du France.

Bawdy Tales is designed with the collector in mind, utilizing vegan leather and gold embossing to simulate period morocco binding.
Art Historian Sarah Burns introduces Lepoittevin's work and career. Expert collector of written erotica, "Lady Fanny Woodcock" contributes a short history of the erotic book in Western culture.

Eugène Lepoittevin (1806-1870) was a French artist who achieved early and lifelong success as a landscape and maritime painter. His work ranged from erotic caricatures to massive battle scenes. His lithographs and paintings are in the collections of museums throughout France.

Sarah Burns (Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is Professor Emeritus of Art History, Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Philadelphia, 1989); Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven, 1996); Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2004), and (with John Davis) American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2009).

"Lady Fanny Woodcock" is the sobriquet of a respected collector of erotic books researcher of their bibliographic history.