The Joy Spot [Inscribed]

San Rafael, CA: Frenchy's Gay Line, 1969. First edition. 187pp. 12mo. Illustrated wraps. Front cover price-clipped at top corner; light wear to exposed portion of underlying leaf. Else very good, with light cover rubbing and toning to leaves. Signed and inscribed to ffep: "For Doug — mon amant débauché — Phil Andros."

Presentation copy of this gay erotic novel penned under his Phil Andros pseudonym by American academic, tattoo artist, and writer Samuel Steward (1909-1993), with an inscription by Steward in his charmingly rococo script to close friend Douglas Martin, "my debauched lover," as Steward playfully refers to him here in French. A student of Steward's at DePaul University in the early 1950s, Martin wrote Steward a warm letter of re-introduction in 1977, sparking a prolific correspondence acknowledged by Steward's biographer Justin Spring as "the most significant and sustaining friendship of Steward's final decades," and "the single greatest consolation to him in his otherwise very lonely old age" (Secret Historian, p.378). A significant association copy of an uncommon work in Steward's oeuvre.

Young 93.