Description

White Stains
Hardcover, ISBN 0715606808
Publisher: Duckworth, London, 1973
Used -Good. Corrected and reset edition, 1973, First thus. This is copy 326 of limited edition of 1,000. Imitation white leather covers with black titles to front and spine. Black end-papers and fore-edges. Third page price clipped. Very light edge wear to front bottom right corner of DJ. Small oval label partially removed from inside front cover at bottom right. Includes dust…).
Variations of sodomy, pederasty, bestiality, and necrophilia are interwoven with gleeful blasphemy in this seminal collection of poetry by Aleister Crowley. Inspired by Krafft-Ebing’s study of sexual perversity, Psychopathia Sexualis, it purports to be “the literary remains of George Archibald Bishop, a neuropath of the Second Empire.” Crowley’s infamous first book, White Stains was clandestinely printed in 1898 by Leonard Smithers. Of the one hundred numbered copies that were originally printed, only a handful were spared destruction by Her Majesty’s Customs; an outcome which speaks against Crowley’s decision to invoke the blessing of the Virgin Mary in his prefatory sonnet. Crowley would go on to establish himself as a leading figure in the Western occult