Hollywood Babylone, Kenneth Anger. First Edition, First Printing.

Hollywood Babylone, Kenneth Anger

True first edition of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger's cult classic Hollywood Babylon. The book details the scandalous lives of Hollywood stars, from the Silent Era icons of D.W. Griffith and Gloria Swanson to 1960s bombshells Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. First released in France in 1959, it divulges gruesome and gory details: suicides, sex scandals, mental illness and addiction. When it was published in the US in 1965, it was banned 10 days later, and wasn't published again until 1975. Upon its second release in 1975, The New York Times said of it "If a book such as this can be said to have charm, it lies in the fact that here is a book without one single redeeming merit."

Paris: J.J. Pauvert, 1959. Stiff cardstock wraps with pictorial dust jacket, text in French. About very good condition. Foxing to cardstock wraps, endpapers beginning to lift, jacket shows some shelfwear with neat tape reinforcements to verso at joints, faint rust-colored spotting to front panel near spine, bump to top corner. Internally clean with no markings. Scarce in the original French edition.