First edition, printed in a small number of copies, of this offprint from issues 314 and 318 of the Revue africaine (1923 and 1924).
Half black shagreen binding, spine with five raised bands, gilt date at foot, marbled paper boards, marbled endpapers, original wrappers and spine preserved, contemporary binding.
Illustrated with 4 plates, including a frontispiece portrait. Tailliart 592.
Rare copy of this meticulous monograph (later reissued under the Champion imprint), documenting the journey Daudet made to Algeria from 21 December 1861 to 25 February 1862, accompanied by his cousin Reynaud.
Drawing on a wealth of sources, the author succeeded in reconstructing the writer’s exact itinerary; the purpose of the work was to respond to Degoumois’s claims in L’Algérie d’Alphonse Daudet : Essai sur les sources et les procédés d’imitation d’A. Daudet (Geneva, 1922), in which he asserted that most of the Algerian descriptions found in Lettres de mon moulin, Tartarin de Tarascon and Contes du lundi were merely borrowed from Eugène Fromentin.
Our copy is enriched with an autograph letter signed by Jules Caillat, dated Paris, 7 June [1924?], most likely addressed to the publisher (bifolium of 4 pp. in-12), sent together with three original photographic plates (those used for the book’s illustrations) and a roll containing a proof of each.
Caillat also discusses the desired print run (350 copies, of which only 300 were available for sale) and the typographical changes required in the transition from periodical articles to book form.