Les Chants du Quartier Latin et de l'Internat avec la musique et 53 illustrations coloriees au pochoir.
1931. Luxembourg: Privately Printed, n.d. [but Paris: Guibal? c.1931].
4to, 214 pp. With 53 color pochoir illustrations. Original printed wrappers, binding cracked and shaken but just holding, wrappers unevenly sunned, internally fine.
§ Privately published in an unknown edition. Worldcat lists copies only at Yale and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, although it is not rare in commerce. This copy from the library of Gershon Legman. A collection of fifty bawdy ballads beginning with the venerable and obscene "Les Trois Orfevres a la Saint Eloi." In the forward, the compiler, under the pseudonym "Vidame de Bozegie," explains the book was demanded by subscribers to his previous work, 3 Orfèvres, à la Saint-Èloi (privately printed in Paris in 1930), who welcomed it as a monument de la chanson étudiant but lamented the lack of printed music.
In this volume he presents fifty of "the best songs," in "a luxury edition, on beautiful paper, illustrated with color drawings, worthy of a bibliophile." The music for each song is illustrated by pochoir.
The author goes on to state: "I have avoided giving the illustrations an erotic character. They are obviously saucy, but do not shock too-puritan eyes. I believe them to be worthy of the text." Puritan eyes would probably disagree in the strongest possible terms, but it is true that alongside the lyrics the illustrations are comparatively restrained.
Gershon Legman, the great bibliographer of erotica, erotic folklore, and origami, attributed the work to Edmond Bernard who was responsible for other significant collections of erotic folksongs. See Legman, G. "Erotic Folksongs and Ballads: An International Bibliography." The Journal of American Folklore vol. 103, no. 410 (1990): 417-501, referencing his own (presumably this) copy: "(Copy: G. Legman.) Edited by Edmond Dardenne Bernard, as a supplement to his Anthologie Hospitaliere et Latinesque (1911-13) and its partial reprinting in 1930 as Trois
Orfevres a la Saint-Eloi. Gives the musical notation, apparently for the first time, for these "Chansons de Salles de Garde," all later printed music for these (except that of STAUB, q.v.) being largely derived from this edition and not collected in the field." Item #123808
Price: $200.00