Georges Bataille: Story of the Eye (Grunts Rare Books, 2024)

*Please note, our first edition sold out very quickly, we are now accepting orders for the SECOND PRINTING, also limited to 30 copies*

4 x 7 in
149 pages
Six engravings by Hans Bellmer
Translated by Joachim Neugroschel (1978)
ISBN-13: 979-8-9850425-6-6
Second edition, limited to 30 copies 

Histoire de l’oeil (Story of the Eye) is the first work of fiction published by Georges Bataille (1897-1962). Illustrative of Bataille’s philosophy regarding the relationship between eroticism and transgression, Story of the Eye expands upon Bataille’s theories on ‘expenditure’ and the ‘sacred,’ where the act of transgression and the experience of extreme pleasure are intertwined with the potential for violence and death. 

The first edition of the book was published, under the pseudonym of Lord Auch, by René Bonnel in 1928. The ‘nouvelle version’ exhibited here, illustrated with six etchings by the German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975), was edited by the writer and publisher Alain Gheerbrant in 1947, in spite of the date indicated on the title-page. 

A later edition of Story of the Eye, without Bellmer’s illustrations, was discreetly published in Paris in 1951, before being condemned by the Criminal Court of the Seine, France, the spring of the same year. The first edition to be issued under the author’s real name was published in 1967, after Georges Bataille’s death, by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, notable for also publishing the works of the Marquis de Sade and Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon.2 

Compiled here, haphazardly and for the first time, is the English language version of Story of the Eye and preface to W.C., translated by Joachim Neugroschel in 1978, paired with the Bellmer illustrations from the 1947 printing.

Also included in the present edition are Roland Barthes’ The Metaphor of the Eye (1963) and Susan Sontag’s The Pornographic Imagination (1967) from the Penguin edition of Story of the Eye from 2014.

Grunts Rare Books proudly publishes our unique edition of Story of the Eye on the occasion of our bookstore exhibition with Hans Bellmer, on view from November 22nd, 2024 to January 17th, 2025.

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Working individually and in collaboration, artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) and writer Georges Bataille (1897-1962) produced some of the most enduringly searing and transgressive works of erotic art from the surrealist milieu. Bataille penned his pornographic novel Story of the Eye (Histoire de l'oeil) under the pseudonym Lord Auch in 1928, amidst post-war French reconstruction and political unease; a later version of Histoire de l’oeil, published in Paris in 1951, was censured and banned by the Criminal Court of the Seine due to its explicit depictions of sex and violence. In 1933, with Hitler rising to power, Hans Bellmer completed his first poupée, a ball-jointed doll in the form of an adolescent girl whose articulated body afforded infinite recombinatory possibilities corresponding to the artist’s polymorphously perverse desires.

Grunts Rare Books is pleased to announce the exhibition Hans Bellmer, featuring a copy of the 1947 edition of Georges Bataille’s Histoire de l'oeil, with illustrations by Hans Bellmer, the 63rd in an edition of 199. 

To supplement, we are thrilled to release an English language issue of Bataille’s ‘Story of the Eye’ with Bellmer’s 1947 illustration, parallel to Grunts Rare Books’ debut book club inaugurated by the same title.