Les Phénomènes de Matérialisation, by Juliette Alexandre Bisson, pub. Librairie Felix Alcan, 1914. 1ere edition. Large octavo. Marbled boards with cloth spine bearing gilt titles. 311 pp. Illustrated with many b/w photographs of 'spirit photography '. To the half-title, the author, Juliette Alexandre Bisson, has inscribed the book to J. Ch. Roux, a French physician and gastroenterologist, who also wrote on psychic subjects. (His paper on Thought Transference, or telepathy, was published in Annales des Sciences Psychiques vol iii p 202, 203) From the Foreword - Before making known to readers the experiments that are the subject of this work, I believe it useful to indicate the spirit in which they were undertaken. "Materialisation phenomena have attracted me for a long time; they are highly debated, and I have always wished to one day be able to study them myself. But to achieve the result I was seeking, I insisted on surrounding myself with guarantees that ruled out any chance of fraud and on progressively perfecting my method to adapt it, as far as possible, to the conditions required by scientific experimentation. It is the result of these efforts that the present work makes known, which, I hasten to add, has nothing of the technical and complete treatise that only a man of the laboratory could write. My study, in fact, only aims to faithfully and as clearly as possible recount the facts of which a well-meaning observer has been a witness. And I will consider myself largely rewarded for my perseverance if the observations I have recorded in the following pages have the virtue of leading scientists themselves to study [them] better than I have been able to..." Juliette Alexandre Bisson [1861-1956] was the wife of the French playwright, Alexandre Bisson [1848-1912]. The book records her research with the medium who styled herself Eva Carriere [nee Marthe Beraud, 1886-1943]. Carriere and Juliette Alexandre-Bisson were, according to the author, Ruth Brandon in her book 'The Spiritualists', involved in a romantic relationship. Carriere was twenty-eight years younger than Bisson, and only 19 when she and Bisson arranged a series of séances at the Villa Carmen in Algiers. The séances appear to have been 'performed' to titillate the male participants, involving intimate examinations of Carriere by Bisson beforehand to prove that no 'ectoplasm' was hidden. Carriere often appeared naked during the course of the séance. The photographs in the book were taken by Bisson, and, though they appear like crude fakes, many of the participants were either taken in, or suppressed their doubts. In her book, Brandon argues that the erotically charged atmosphere was arranged to heighten the male participants' emotional responses. There is nothing in the Avant-Propos to suggest that the women were experimenting to demonstrate (largely male) gullibility, but Bisson's book must surely be read now as a record of precisely that. In a way, the séances they conducted together were a kind of semi-pornographic performance art, an almighty joke carried out with a straight face. An exceptionally rare title, a record less of psychic phenomena than a fraudulent enterprise perpetrated by two women. The age difference, with Bisson being much the senior to the teenage Carriere, might suggest that the older woman was the controlling partner, but the fraud would not have worked unless Carriere was possessed of a sexual power over both sexes. A copy of this book was, at one time, in the library of W.B. Yeats. To the pastedown is the bookplate of Alan Gauld [1932-2024], writer on parapsychology.