Akademos, Revue mensuelle d'art libre et de critique Collection complète des douze numéros en tirage de tête

- Albert Messein, Paris 15 janvier 1909-15 décembre 1909, 22x25cm, 12 livraisons reliées en quatre volumes. - "Akademos will remain an ephemeral nonetheless high-quality creation, a groundbreaking gesture that will be an important milestone both in the history of the homosexual movement and the beginning of the 20th century" Rare complete first edition one of the rare deluxe copies on papier japon with colored illustrations in four states of this luxurious literary and artistic journal. Founded by sybarite Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen, with twelve monthly issues published in the year 1909. Our copy includes the four states of each 23 engravings mixing different artistic movements: Arts & Crafts, Symbolism, Renaissance, Art Nouveau and Antique, after M. Armfield, H.S. Ciolkowski, L. Sarluis, B. Luini, G. A. Bazzi, G. Moreau, Raphaël, L. da Vinci, Pollaiolo, Il Correggio, P. de la Francesca, Rubens, J. de Ribera, F. Goya, M. Rodo, Cardet, as well as statues and stelae from Naples and Athens museums. Elegant cover design by George Auriol, master of Art Nouveau typography. Half beige cloth, brown morocco title-pieces, marbled paper boards, original spine and wrappers preserved for each issue, a fine uncut copy. Texts by L. Tailhade, É. Verhaeren, R. Vivien, Colette, J. Péladan, J. Moréas, H. Barbusse, A. Symons, J. d'Adelswärd-Fersen, J. Antoine-Orliac, P. Berrichon, J. Bois, J. Bouscatel, T. Derème, L. Deubel, A. du Fresnois, M. Gaucher, R. Ghil, H. Guilbeaux, J.-C. Holl, T. Klingsor, E. La Jeunesse, G. de Lautrec, A. Léger, Legrand-Chabrier, L. Mandin, F.T. Marinetti, F. de Miomandre, J.-A. Nau, M. de Noisay, J. Ochsé, E. Pilon, E. Raynaud, A. Salmon, V. de Saint-Point, R. Scheffer, T. de Visan. Handsome and extremely rare copy of the first French homosexual journal. It was not until 1869 that the term "homosexual" appeared, in epistolary exchanges between German journalists and lawyers Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kertbeny. Their writings document the first attempts to describe physical attraction to the same sex, not condemning the act, rather in the hopes of gaining social acceptance for another form of sexuality. Although homosexual relations remain a constitutive element of human societies since the very beginning, they were viewed under the single perspective of carnal relations for a long time. Stigmatized, the "inverted" sexual act is in turn codified, tolerated or severely condemned throughout ages and cultures yet never interpreted under the angle of exclusive attraction. France was the first country to decriminalize homosexuality in removing the "crime of sodomy" from the Code pénal in 1791, but it was not until the second half of the 19th century that emerged an awareness of a true homosexual identity as described by Michel Foucault in his Histoire de la sexualité: "The 19th homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, [.]. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him [.] It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature. We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized [.] less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species". Within this context, Balzac created characters fully embracing their "other" sexuality, notably Zambinella, Seraphita and especially Vautrin, considered as the first homosexual in French literature. In the meantime, Baudelaire who initially wanted to t