"A poet can survive anything but a misprint."
Oscar Wilde
First edition printed in 500 numbered copies on Japan paper.
Work illustrated with drawings by Job after pencil sketches.
Handsome copy despite light worming of no consequence to the boards.
Manuscript signatures of Job and Stéphen Liégeard below the justification page.
New edition. Portrait frontispiece. Title pages in red and black.
Contemporary full glazed brown calf binding. Decorated smooth spine. Brown calf title-label, black calf volume label. Light rubbing. Fine copy, very fresh.
The first two volumes are devoted to the poetic works, the third to the comedies. These works contain the Odes, Cantatas, Epistles, Allegories, Epigrams, and the comedies (Le flatteur, Le capricieux, Le caffé, La ceinture magique). Jean-Baptiste Rousseau was considered the greatest lyric poet of his time; he is especially credited with writing the first French cantatas, this secular genre that was set to music by the most brilliant composers. However, the academic style of Rousseau's writing did not outlive him.
Second edition, printed in a small number of copies on Hollande laid paper.
3/4 red morocco, five raised bands-spine, gilt date at foot. Slight, superficial fading to spine, marbled paperboards, pebbled flyleaves and pastedowns, original covers and spine preserved, top edge gilt, A finely executed, unsigned binding from the late 19th to early 20th century.
Provenance: from the library of Simone and André Maurois, with their engraved bookplate on front pastedown.
Signed and inscribed copy by Paul Verlaine to the opera singer Marie-Blanche Vasnier : "A Madame Vasnier, hommage respectueux. P. Verlaine." [To Madame Vasnier, with respectful homage. P. Verlaine']
Marie-Blanche Vasnier was the muse of the young Claude Debussy, fourteen years her junior, to whom he dedicated numerous songs of love.
First collective edition, one of the 23 numbered copies on vélin pur fil Lafuma Navarre, the only deluxe copies ("grands papiers").
Rare and very nice copy.
Rare first edition, with the wrapper and title page dated 1874.
Half black morocco binding with corners, spine with five raised bands, date at foot, gilt fillet on boards, combed paper pastedowns and endpapers, original wrappers preserved, top edge gilt, binding signed Alix.
Printed in 1869 by Lacroix, this edition was not released for sale for fear of censorship. Only about ten copies were stitched and given to the author (five have been recorded to date). In 1874, Jean-Baptiste Rozez, another Belgian publisher-bookseller, acquired the stock and published the work with a wrapper and cancel title page dated 1874, without publisher's imprint. It was in his bookshop that the poets of the Jeune Belgique would be the first to discover this text. A literature of vertigo at the limits of the bearable, of adolescent excess, of total darkness, Maldoror, or the epic of a figure of evil wandering through the world, became famous thanks to the Surrealists who made it a true aesthetic manifesto.
A fine copy elegantly bound.
