Musk, Hashish and Blood
Hector France
$40.00

Number 131 of “500 copies of this Art Edition–hand colored–of Musk, Hashish and Blood for private subscription among adult collectors of Anthropology.”
s/t: With Twenty-two Etchings [by Édouard-Henri Avril (1849-1928)], Printed for Subscribers Only
A graphic and exciting picture of the Algerian desert, its tribes and their astounding customs in a sensational recounting of a soldier’s experiences in North Africa that was for decades available only through rare underground editions.
Not much is known of Hector France, except that he died in 1908. Not much is known about ‘Musk, Hashish and Blood’, either. It was printed in a limited edition of only 500 copies in Britain in 1900, and then printed in an equally small edition in America 40 years later. Hector France lived an adventurous life, and wrote about it with style and gusto. One reason ‘Musk, Hashish and Blood’ never saw the equivalent of a mass market edition during France’s lifetime is because he felt, with some cause, that many of the things he described would have sent his Victorian readership into shock–and yet there is a certain romance to be discovered amid the exquisitely-described barbarism, an exoticism that cannot be found in today’s world, that makes this book a fitting entry in the library.