This scandalous little work appeared in France under the title “Letter to La Présidente.”

Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) was a novelist and poet, one of the champions of Romanticism. In 1850, he and his friend Louis de Cormenin visited Italy, so he wrote his friends back home a letter about their adventures. The result was a rollicking “filthy letter,” packed with jokes, slang, obsolete words, literary allusions, puns, alliterations, neologisms, Spoonerisms, verses, outrageous metaphors, and Rabelaisian lists. It was published privately in 1890, and became a clandestine classic.

A FILTHY LETTER
Théophile Gautier
Translated from the French by Doug Skinner,
with an introduction & notes on the text
Pocket Erotica Series #28
74 pp., 4 x 6 inches;
979-8-9894330-7-0