GIFTS IN

CHIAROSCURO

For what obscure reason or what luminous evidence does "black and white" so naturally evoke the authenticity of creation? As if colors were only a disguise of a two-tone purity: ink and paper from the origins of typography; silver chloride in the camera obscura dating back to photographic beginnings; the white moon, and its black shell from our first cinematographic emotion...

It does not matter then that the first film was a color cartoon, that photography first came out in sepia, that Gutenberg himself conceived his bible with red-printed initials. Nothing can alter the poetic and aesthetic power of this alliance between light and shadow, symbol of bookish knowledge and of essential philosophical duality. A necessary union of opposites that produces meaning, form and color.

Edition-Originale draws from the grey winter season to extract the black and white gold of the most beautiful scholarly, literary and pictorial works...

Our lists of gift ideas 

"In nature, color does not exist any more than line;

there is only the sun and the shadows. With a piece of coal, I will make a painting. [...] In nature there is only black and white"

Francisco de Goya

From Rembrandt to Malevitch,

painters have always been fascinated by the fruitful polarity of black and white.

Despite all the technical developments, the great contemporary photographers still prefer this "essence of the discipline".

As for the writer, there is only one recipe for creation:

black coffee and sleepless nights under the milky way.

Our Previous Gift Selections 

⬧ Hetzel Editions of Jules Verne 

⬧ The Classics

⬧ Fine Books for Small Prices

⬧ Fine Bindings

⬧ Fifty Masterpieces

⬧Scripta volant (The Art of Correspondence)

⬧ Great Discoveries

Our Latest Investigations

◊ Focus on an autograph letter of Baudelaire to his mother

◊ Focus on a correspondence from Camus and Feraoun

◊ Focus on an original photograph of Pablo Picasso at the Casa di Marco Lucrezio, Pompeii spring 1917

◊ Julie ou La nouvelle Louise of Delacroix - Letters from a lover

◊ Baudelaire & Hugo : the story of this tempestuous meeting between the "Albatross" and the "Ocean Man"

◊ The extraordinary journey of Hetzel's editions: finest publisher's bindings of the XIXth century

◊ Proust's Les Plaisirs et les Jours

◊ Freud without complex