SANDFORD, Lettice. GOLDEN COCKEREL PRESS. LASCARIS, Evadne. ~ The Golden Bed of Kydno.
12 erotic line engravings by Lettice Sandford. One of 60 special copies, this no. 35 signed by the translator, with an extra suite of 12 prints individually signed. Printed in the splendid Perpetua type in orange and black. Sm. folio, bound by Henry Wood in full red morocco with illustration by Lettice Sandford blocked in gilt on the upper cover, elaborate gilt endpapers, t.e.g., others uncut, the extra suite are in the original yellow sleeve, all housed in the original gilt box. In extremely good condition.
A Lesbian tale in verse, apparently written in the early nineteenth century in two parts and telling the tale supposedly from the late nineteenth century of a lady calling herself Kydno who, tired of Paris, went by yacht to the Island of Lesbos and had built a magnificent Palace of Memory. She is an invention like Pierre Louys’ Bilitis bu the story had it that she gathered there a multitude of girls and gave them free ‘education’. Growing old she left the college and wandered alone over the world, composing her ‘Imitation of Sappho’ of which there is not trace. She polished these, her epigrams, collected as ‘The Golden Bed’ and died in 1910 at Rhodes and was buried there.
Translated form the modern Greek of Evadne Lascaris by P. Mathers who terms the book a “light coronal of perversities”.