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INTRODUCTION BY COLLECTOR Tony Fekete EUROPE, DAUGHTER OF EROS A bookseller friend of mine recently pointed out that I am one of the few curiosa collectors who sell their library while they are still alive. Most wait until they die, leaving their widows to dispose of their books. In reality, very few collections survive their founder. The dispersal of a collection is an almost inevitable event. The only libraries that survive are donations, drowned out by large institutions, or, sometimes, certain castle libraries, assembled by aristocrats eager for erudition, which pass from one generation to the next, often without much bibliophile interest, and very rarely consisting of curiosities. Beyond erotica, I am obsessed with many things and the importance and dominance of curiosa among my books does not reflect the range of my interests. Thus, selling these books is a way to rebalance my collection with my personality and eventually make my future widow's job easier... It seems important to me, as a bibliophile, to be able to give up one's books, to keep the intellectual energy, and a certain clarity of vision. During an important sale, a few years ago, I parted with a substantial part of the French curiosa classics. I kept some of them by taste, but I preferred to focus on the books or manuscripts - Hungarian, Portuguese, Romanian, Polish, etc. - that I still discover during the course of my work. - I am still discovering them in the course of my many travels. I have not completely abandoned my interest in curiosa. It takes its place alongside other themes, linked to my passion for travel and the discovery of languages and cultures. A collector never stops. He always devotes himself to his first passion, sacrificing time for his other activities. A very good German friend of mine, one of the most important lovers of erotic art, started collecting African masks and sculptures five years ago. My passion is travel, the development of languages and cultures, especially European ones. With this new passion - not so new because my first library was already dedicated to travel guides - I discovered a multitude of essential books, completely forgotten, like small unknown niches of our European culture. I have become aware of the importance of minority languages for the richness of our cultural life and for their capacity to give us new perspectives on the contemporary world. To this end, I am now enthusiastically searching for books in Ruthenian, Faroese, Swiss Romansh, Basque, Maltese, Welsh, etc. I have found the first Russian Church Bible of 1581, the first English-Welsh dictionary of 1547 and a translation of Robinson Crusoe of 1846, which is the first literary work in Maltese. In a few years, I have more than one hundred and sixty languages represented in my library, and I only speak nine of them... Of course, in this sale I am offering you rare erotic works, which I have kept until now, but above all, in addition to the certain interest of the occult world of curiosa, I want to share with you this life of explorer, enamoured of thoughts and cultures... Tony FEKETE
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