FRANCE, Hector. The Grip of Desire: The Story of a Parish Priest. Trans. from the French, uncredited. Illustrated by Mahlon Blaine. New York: Alpha Book Company. 1930. 8vo. First American edition. Publisher’s black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine with motif illustration to front board, in the suitably gripping dust jacket by Blaine. Excellent illustrated endpapers, with numerous illustrations. A near fine copy overall. The cloth clean and bright, slightly faded lettering, but the boards clean and sharp. The binding tight and perhaps very trivially rolled, but the contents clean and fine throughout. The dust jacket unpriced and complete, gently bumped to extremities.
Written some time in the late nineteenth century, the novel follows the Curé of Atlhausen, a thirty-year-old parish priest overwhelmed by the struggle between his celibate position of power and his uncontrollable fetish of young girls—’pretty faces’ and ‘tempting lips’ his moral-shattering kryptonite. Hector France lived in the same circle as Charles Carrington, the legendary publisher of nineteenth century erotica, the pair publishing various novels and stories together alongside Georges Grassal. Unlike the more overtly-decadent works of his other works, this is an often balanced interrogation of morality vs. desire, though still far from any sort of treatise—in a brief introduction by the author, he warns ‘if you come across any word which offends your ears, any picture which distresses your eyes, blame only your own curiosity’. Mahlon Blaine’s outlandish and risqué illustrations quite gloriously support the production. The artist remains a bit of an enigma, much of his life constructed from humorous conjecture on account of his own mendacity. A splendid example.
FRANCE, Hector. The Grip of Desire: The Story of a Parish Priest. Trans. from the French, uncredited. Illustrated by Mahlon Blaine. New York: Alpha Book Company. 1930. 8vo. First American edition. Publisher’s black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine with motif illustration to front board, in the suitably gripping dust jacket by Blaine. Excellent illustrated endpapers, with numerous illustrations. A near fine copy overall. The cloth clean and bright, slightly faded lettering, but the boards clean and sharp. The binding tight and perhaps very trivially rolled, but the contents clean and fine throughout. The dust jacket unpriced and complete, gently bumped to extremities.
Written some time in the late nineteenth century, the novel follows the Curé of Atlhausen, a thirty-year-old parish priest overwhelmed by the struggle between his celibate position of power and his uncontrollable fetish of young girls—’pretty faces’ and ‘tempting lips’ his moral-shattering kryptonite. Hector France lived in the same circle as Charles Carrington, the legendary publisher of nineteenth century erotica, the pair publishing various novels and stories together alongside Georges Grassal. Unlike the more overtly-decadent works of his other works, this is an often balanced interrogation of morality vs. desire, though still far from any sort of treatise—in a brief introduction by the author, he warns ‘if you come across any word which offends your ears, any picture which distresses your eyes, blame only your own curiosity’. Mahlon Blaine’s outlandish and risqué illustrations quite gloriously support the production. The artist remains a bit of an enigma, much of his life constructed from humorous conjecture on account of his own mendacity. A splendid example.
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