Aphrodite

Name: Aphrodite
Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
Author: Unknown Author
ISBN: 9781499533309

by Unknown Author

4.0

(3 ratings)

176 pages2014CreateSpace Independent Publishing PlatformISBN 9781499533309

History

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About this book

This was "the only only complete English version extant" of a novel originally in French about a courtesan living in ancient Alexandria. The book is lavishly illustrated, but is sloppy in other ways. For instance, every time there is a full page illustration (and there are many) the page numbering skips, and the margins of the page are not evenly wide. This is the kind of book that you had to cut the pages with a knife before you could read it. You could call the story erotica, but it is no worse than The Decameron or Chaucer. It must have been pretty hot reading in 1906. The book has a page stating "This Edition on Large Paper is limited to 1000 copies of which this is No......" but nobody bothered to fill in the number, so I would guess that more than 1,000 of these were printed.

Publication Details

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2014
Pages: 176
ISBN: 9781499533309

About Unknown Author

Pierre Louÿs, pseudonym of Pierre Louis (born Dec. 10, 1870, Ghent, Belgium—died June 4, 1925, Paris, France), French novelist and poet whose merit and limitation were to express pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection. Louÿs frequented Parnassian and Symbolist circles and was a friend of the composer Claude Debussy. He founded short-lived literary reviews, notably La Conque (1891). His Chansons de Bilitis (1894), prose poems about Sapphic love, purporting to be translations from the Greek, deceived even experts. Aphrodite (1896), a novel depicting courtesan life in ancient Alexandria, made him famous. His best novel is La Femme et le pantin (1898; Woman and Puppet), which is set in Spain. Louÿs’s popularity, which rested more on his eroticism than on purely aesthetic grounds, has faded. [Encyclopædia Britannica]