L’Anti-vierge

A rare deluxe-paper copy of the sequel to Emmanuelle, first published clandestinely in 1959. The author’s name appeared for the first time only eight years later: Emmanuelle Arsan. This was a pseudonym for Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane, a French diplomat with the United Nations for SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), previously posted in Bangkok. The book was written under the cover of his wife, Marayat Andriane Bibidh, then aged twenty and of Thai origin, whom he had married when she was sixteen.

“The first publication of Emmanuelle was done under the counter. The book had a considerable impact. I received — which was very rare for a clandestine book — an enormous number of articles, all favorable. The critics did not play the little Parisian game of ‘being in the know’ or pretending to be. Everyone said: ‘a book bearing no publisher’s name’ — even though it was I who had sent it to them, specifically instructing them not to mention my name, since at that time it meant an unmitigated trip to the police court” (Eric Losfeld, Endetté comme une mule, ou la passion d’éditer, Paris, Belfond, 1979, p. 162).

The book was officially published by Le Terrain Vague in 1967, this time under the author’s name Emmanuelle Arsan. Within a few weeks, 100,000 copies were sold, and Emmanuelle ranked thirteenth among the best-selling books of 1968 — before the publication was banned. On 11 January 1968, a decree from the Ministry of the Interior prohibited any advertising or display of the book in bookshops. But the partial ban only fueled curiosity, and Losfeld’s general catalogue, in the winter of 1968, carried a note under the heading “Second rayon”: “We remind booksellers that this work, by decree of the Ministry of the Interior, has been subject to the following prohibitive measures: sale or offer to minors under eighteen, display, and poster advertising.” Losfeld, ever the provocateur, nonetheless announced, in a box just below, the October 1968 release of the second volume of Emmanuelle: L’Anti-vierge.

As with the 1967 edition of Emmanuelle, the volume was issued in a deluxe-paper printing of 50 réimposé copies.

Dutel, Bibliographie des ouvrages érotiques publiés clandestinement en français entre 1920 et 1970, no. 1470; Pia, 415.