Item #6097 Quaint Stories of the Samurais. Ibara SAIKAKU.

Quaint Stories of the Samurais

Paris: Printed for Private Distribution (Contact Editions, 1929).

Item #6097

The author of these gay stories was a seventeenth century Japanese writer whose stories about samurai man-youth relations have been widely reprinted. The stories collected here were translated by Ken Sato and are the first English transcriptions, published by Robert McAlmon's Contact Editions. Originally intended to be a two volume book, McAlmon reported to Sylvia Beach that many of the stories "got lost in the mails," but there were still enough (111 printed pages), he reckoned, to provide amusement "without the matter getting wearisome." He had read the Sato manuscript on his trip to America and had found a pleasing naiveté in the stories as well as "situations so completely horrifying to Anglo-Saxondom" that he vowed "they'd better be done."' (Hugh Ford, Published In Paris, Garnstone Press, 1975).
Very good in original lightly worn wrappers, small closed tear at head of spine. With the small bookplate of renowned gay collector Herbert Boyce Satcher on front free endpaper. One of 500 copies printed, although rarer in commerce than this would imply.

Price: $325.00

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