The Decadent Book
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, decadent culture is manifest not only between the covers of a book, but also on them, with the book itself taking material form as an aesthetic artifact of the very culture the book describes. This essay considers this phenomenon in relation to the livres de luxe produced by French bibliophile societies of this era. Following an outline of French bibliophile culture and its promotion of a decadent trend in the French book, Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884) serves as case study to consider the decadent materiality of the book, in two senses: first, how decadent bibliophilia and the decadent book arts are represented in this novel; second, how the novel itself was subject to decadent embodiment in a 1903 edition produced for the society Les Cent Bibliophiles, and in a series of unique bindings commissioned by its bibliophile owners.