From the Library of Graham Pollard
BAUDELAIRE, Charles.
Oeuvres complètes … Les Fleurs du mal. Paris, Alphonse Lemerre, [1917?].
12mo, pp. [4], 382, [2], with etched frontispiece portrait with tissue guard; title printed in red and black with woodcut device; a very good copy; in contemporary brown half morocco with marbled sides, spine gilt in compartments and lettered directly in gilt, top-edge gilt, marbled endpapers; inscription ‘Ex Libris | H. Graham Pollard. | April 1920.’ to front flyleaf, later book label of Graham Pollard to front pastedown.
An attractive early twentieth-century edition of Les Fleurs du mal, owned by the young Graham Pollard before going up to Oxford in 1921.
Pollard (1903–1976) would, after leaving Oxford in 1924, take up bookselling with Birrell and Garnett in London before accepting a lecturing position at University College London in 1939. In 1934 he published, with John Carter, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets, exposing T. J. Wise’s forgeries through meticulous research, and in 1965, with Albert Ehrman, The Distribution of Books by Catalogue from the Invention of Printing to A.D. 1800; his Sandars lectures, published as The English Market for Printed Books (1959) are among his many significant contributions to the history of the early English booktrade.