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Arthur RIMBAUD

Une saison en enfer

Alliance typographique (M.J. Poot & Cie), Bruxelles 1873, 12,5x18,5cm, broché.

Anecdotal and insignificant foxing affecting the margins of three leaves. 
First edition published in small numbers at the author's expense.
This very scarce first edition of Une saison en enfer is a major collector's piece on several counts: it remains the only work published by Rimbaud himself, then a young unknown 19-year-old poet. He eventually never honored his debt towards the printer. The latter therefore kept almost the entire print, subsequently forgotten in the workshop (Arthur Rimbaud obtained only a dozen copies offered to his friends). The stock was found in 1901 by a bibliophile who retrieved the well-preserved 425 copies and destroyed the rest damaged by humidity.
The curious composition of the work is also a surprising peculiarity of this precious edition: without a title page nor endpapers (the text begins ex abrupto after the cover and finishes the same way), the seventeen blank pages inserted far and wide in the book, as well as the misprints and spelling errors peppered through the text are also curiosities studied by scholars. C. Bataillé devotes an important article to it in the Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France (2008/3 -Vol. 108) and concludes that an editorial and perhaps auctorial will presides over this surprising layout.
Sought-after and collected very early on by bibliophiles, copies of this mythical edition were usually lavishly bound and very few copies remain “as issued”.

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