It wasn’t until the third time I heard my name being called out at this year’s New York Antiquarian Book Fair that I headed to the next booth. I had no plans of departing from the booth I was in, Jonkers Rare Books; I wanted to take my time, make it last. Tell me if you would have left, had you known this booth showcased first edition copies of James Joyce’s Ulyssesand Dubliners, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Franz Kafka’s The Trial (Willa and Edna Muir translation), and many others that I couldn’t afford the time for…

A surprise! A rare first edition copy of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry volume Les Fleurs du mal. The Flowers of Evil. So, Baudelaire had first published the collection in 1857 and would soon be tried for. In the workshop we attended at Rare Book School in Charlottesville, Virginia, Ms. Ruth-Ellen St. Onge (or Ruth as we know her) had shown to us a proof of the frontispiece of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, remember?; it had his annotations in French, that too in his own hand.

The same Baudelaire’s was a name analogous to ‘Decadence’ in France. Think: a dandy, only French this time. Upon Baudelaire’s death, Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a verse elegy to him, which in turn, steered young Oscar Wilde into reading poetry; Baudelaire also notably inspired the Yellow Bookpoets; the Rossetti brothers owned a rare first edition copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal… a chain of these small links between Baudelaire and the Victorian artists can be found in Patricia Clements’s Baudelaire & the English Tradition. Isn’t it intriguing that Baudelaire had followed us again–at least two times in my notice–in our exploration of the English Tradition?

By the way, if I have left you hanging too long, I am sorry, Baudelaire was tried for…. you guessed it! … offending the Victorian morals, or “outrage à la morale publique.” I wasn’t going to offend any book-fair morals; I might not have stopped gushing though. Ah, for that! Ms. Miranda Garno Nesler of Whitmore Rare Books noticed it, and boom, pulled out a rare presentation copy of the first edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. That beauty was in a brown Morocco crushed binding! Its publisher was Poulet-Malassis. Between the first two raised bands of its spine were the author’s and the work’s names respectively (separated by a small line), and at the very bottom was lettered “PARIS 1857,” all in gold and horizontal. A first issue, it ran with the title misprint “Feurs” on pages 31 and 108, page 45 misnumbered 44, and the misprint “captieux” on p. 201.

On the half-title, Baudelaire’s inscriptions (although only very dimly) read: “à M. Hostein, en lui demandant encore un peu de patience, Ch. Baudelaire:” “to Mr. Hostein, asking again a little patience from him, Ch. Baudelaire.” Monsieur Hippolyte Hostein was a French playwright who Baudelaire had hoped would let him write a play based on the poem “Le Vin de l’assassin” from his collection; the hope was that this, in turn, would get him to meet the actress Baudelaire was so fond of. The play never happened; Baudelaire was gentle enough to send him an apology in form of this copy. This sweet copy that included six poems that were shortly removed upon order after publication. These were Les Bijoux, Le Léthé, A celle qui est trop gaie, Femmes damnées, Lesbos and Les Métamorphoses du vampire.

Come time of departure, Ms. Garno Nesler was kind enough also to open and show us the marbled endpaper and let me take as many pictures as I could, even when she knew I was in no position to buy the $95,000 treasure. Not yet. I wandered around, to gush more, and kind her, she would show me John Williams’s Stoner from various angles, tell me why their first edition copies of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Maxwell Kenton’s Candy looked quite the same.

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