Ḥusn kı̄ devı̄

by Milo Manara, Prepared by Pierre Louys; Willis L. Parker, Pierre Louÿs, Jean-Paul Goujon, Georges Bess

1925 first published Urdu Novel 240 pages 1 edition

RomanceHistorical fiction

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.