Written during his confinement at the Château de Vincennes between 1777 and 1780 under a lettre de cachet procured by his father, Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau's Errotika Biblion remains one of the most intellectually audacious and subversive texts of the French Enlightenment. Disguised under the fictitious and ironic imprint of the Vatican Press in Rome (De l'imprimerie du Vatican), the work was printed clandestinely in Switzerland in 1783 to evade the royal censors of the Ancien Régime. Mirabeau constructs an erudite encyclopedic compendium that deconstructs antique, biblical, and contemporary sexual mores under eleven pseudo-scholarly chapter titles drawn from Hebrew and Greek roots, systematically dismantling ecclesiastical hypocrisies through relentless classical philology and secular rationalism.

This scarce 1783 octavo edition contains the complete collation of iv, 192 pages terminating at the Table of Contents, printed on laid rag paper exhibiting characteristic chain lines and authentic period handling. Bound in fine half tan calf leather over hand-marbled boards, the volume displays a spine configured with five raised bands, blind rules, and delicate gilt titling. Opening past exquisite French snail-patterned swirl marbled endpapers, the text leaves remain sound, securely sewn, and remarkably crisp with mild age toning consistent with late eighteenth-century clandestine press sheets.

Preserved within the personal collection of a prominent Washington, D.C.-area NIH anthropologist and bibliophile, this monumental historical artifact measures approximately 7.85 inches in height, 5.0 inches in width, 0.75 inches in depth, and weighs 0.8 pounds.