Dark writings

First edition on ordinary paper.
Autograph inscription signed by Samuel Beckett to Gaetan Picon.
Spine sunned.

First illustrated edition with 3 title vignettes and 3 figures by Eisen in volume I (as well as 3 pages of engraved music) plus 3 tailpieces and 1 figure by Marillier, 2 by Barbier and 3 title vignettes by Marillier in volume II, plus 3 tailpieces. All engraved by Fessard, Longueil, Née, Delaunay and Halbou. Very fine illustration, very elegant.
Contemporary full calf binding with scale pattern. Spine with raised bands decorated. Red morocco title labels, and green morocco volume labels. Triple-ruled frame on boards. Edges gilt. Small lack to upper joint at head of volume I. Signs of rubbing. Pale scattered foxing. One lack to margin of p. 479. The binder has inverted the volume numbers.

 

Handsome copy.

Volume I: Salisbury, Varbeck, Le Sire de Crequy.
Volume II: Le Prince de Bretagne, La Duchesse de Chatillon, Le Comte de Strafford.

Most of Baculard d'Arnaud's narratives show an immoderate taste for true anecdotes (historical or picturesque and drawn from various regions: Italy, Germany, Spain) and the author is perfectly representative of this literature that would give rise to the gothic and dark novel. An exacerbated, sparkling sentimentalism animates the author's works, with a certain complacency in depicting evil and a rather morbid pleasure in emotions. Were it not for the framework that often defines the gothic novel, which is absent from d'Arnaud's works (except for Le Comte de Comminges), the author is very close to this movement in late 18th-century literature.

First edition.
Bound in red half Russia with corners, spine with four raised bands gilt-ruled and decorated with double gilt panels, date in gilt at foot within a compartment, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, rare wrappers and spine preserved, top edge gilt, uncut, binding signed by Bernasconi.
The catalogue leaf of Victor Hugo’s works is present. A few folding creases to some leaves.

Mounted opposite the definitive version printed on p. 223 is a precious autograph poem by Victor Hugo, entitled “La pauvre fleur disait au papillon céleste”, on two folded leaves mounted on a stub. This is a first version, consisting of four quatrains. These verses were reworked by Hugo, with some variants, in the definitive version, augmented with four additional quatrains.

The poem was composed by Hugo for his mistress Juliette Drouet, whom he had met two years earlier. It symbolizes the nature of their relationship—the poet bound by his marital and literary life, the young woman condemned to wait for him—and played a central role in their shared imagination: Juliette Drouet frequently quoted the line “Et moi je reste seule à voir tourner mon ombre / À mes pieds !” in her love letters to Victor Hugo. The double motif of the flower and the butterfly, alongside their entwined initials, also appears in the painted decoration of the Chinese salon from Hauteville Fairy, Juliette Drouet’s residence in Guernsey, a décor conceived by Hugo himself and now preserved at the Maison Victor Hugo in Paris.

A fine uncut copy, in a charming signed binding, enriched with a very rare autograph poem by Victor Hugo written for Juliette Drouet.

Edition first in part, one of 30 numbered copies on pur fil, the only large paper copies.
Slight traces of sunning, not serious, to head and to foot of spine.
A good and rare copy.

First edition, one of 150 numbered copies on vélin d'Arches paper, this copy not justified, the only large paper copies along with 92 on vélin supérieur and a few hors commerce.
Autograph inscription signed by Samuel Beckett to a close friend.
A good copy.

First edition, one of 35 numbered copies on Hollande, tirage de tête.
A very good copy, with edges preserved.

A factitious collection composed of the 4 plays by Arnaud: Fayel, Le Comte de Comminge, Merinval, Euphémie. Le comte Comminge is separated from Fayel only by a half-title, just as Euphémie from Mérinval (with no loss in the collation). 3 figures in volume I, one by Eisen, one by Restou, one before letters; one by Eisen and one by Restou in volume II.
Contemporary full mottled calf bindings. Decorated spines with raised bands, roulettes at foot. Red morocco title label, and green morocco volume label. Triple fillet frame on the boards. Gilt edges. Surface wear on the spine of volume II with a loss in the first compartment, and loss of gilding. Surface wear and loss along the lower joint of volume 2. A fairly handsome set. Quality binding.
The 4 tragedies are enriched by numerous pieces (Mémoires du Comte de Comminge, Effets de la vengeance...). His theatre resembles his prose and seeks dramatic effects, his dramas are dark and arouse terror and tragic situations through a grand staging of emotions.

Popular illustrated edition bringing together 14 titles and more, from the Romans populaires illustrés collection. Drawings by Johannot, Beaucé, Staal, Bertall, Baron... It includes the rare title The Monk by Lewis.
Contents: Valérie by Madame de Krudener. Manon Lescaut by Prévost d'Exiles. Le talisman du coeur by Louis Lurine. La peine du talion by Jules Lacroix. Le règne de Satan by Benjamin Gastineau. Riche et pauvre by Emile Souvestre. Télémaque by Fénelon. Mes prisons by Pellico. La princesse de Montpensier by Madame de Lafayette. Les contes de l'atelier by Michel Masson. Le vicaire de Wakefield by Goldsmith. Simple histoire by Inchbald. 3 plays by Beaumarchais. Printed in 2 columns. A half-title of the Romans populaires illustrés has been bound at the beginning of the work with a table of contents that does not correspond at all to the titles in the volume.
Contemporary half black shagreen binding. Smooth spine decorated with a large romantic ornament and a roll at head and foot. One split at head. Rubbing to edges and headcaps, but good copy, particularly fresh, on crisp white paper, free from foxing.
These popular editions are rare in good condition, and very desirable for the quality of their illustrations. They form a too-forgotten history of romantic publishing.

First edition. One of 100 deluxe advance copies on B.F.K. de Rives, only deluxe copies along with 512 others on B.F.K. de Rives.

Precious copy inscribed and dated April 1966 by Beckett to his friend the painter Geer (Van Velde) and his wife Lise.

Nice copy.

“What to say of the sliding planes, the shimmering contours, the cut-out figures in the fog, the balance that any little thing can break, breaking and re-forming themselves under our very eyes? How to talk about the colors that breathe and pant? Of the swarming stasis? Of this world without weight, without force, without shadow? Here everything moves, swims, fells, comes back, falls apart, re-forms. Everything stops, non-stop. One would say it's the revolt of the internal molecules of a stone a split second before its disintegration. That is literature” (The van Veldes' Art, or the World and the Trousers, in Cahiers d'Art n°11-12, Paris 1945).
Beckett here is not talking – despite how it may appear – about his literary oeuvre, but about the paintings of Geer Van Velde, going on to add a few lines later “[Bram] Van Velde paints distance. G[eer] Van Velde paints succession.” This elegy, published on the occasion of the double exhibition of the Van Veldes (Geer at Maeght's and Bram at the Galerie Mai) is the first important text on these painters, more or less unknown to the public at the time: “We've only just started spouting nonsense about the Van Velde brothers, and I'm the first. It's an honor.” This is also the first critical text written directly in French by a young Irish writer who had not, as yet, published anything in France.
Thus, the first and most important of Beckett's writings on art, composed at the dawn of his literary career, establishes – right from the start – a fundamental relationship between his developing work and his friends' art: “Thus this text has often been read in a hollow or in the mirror, as one of the rare designations of Beckett's poetry (to come) by the man himself, a sort of anamorphic program of writing,” (Un pantalon cousu de fil blanc : Beckett et l'épreuve critique by Pierre Vilar).
A real statement of dramaturgical intent, this fundamental text whose introspective value Beckett lays out from the introduction on (“one does nothing but tell stories with words”) ushers in the writer's most fruitful creative period. In essence, like Apollinaire and Cendrars, Beckett draws from the artistic problems of his contemporaries the catalyst of his own future writing through “the deepest questioning of narrative, figurative or poetical presuppositions” (Pascale Casanova in Beckett l'abstracteur).
The major influence of modern painting on the narrative structure – or destructuring – of Beckett's drama and novels would be pointed out and examined by a number of thinkers, among them Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva and Maurice Blanchot. It was, in fact, with the art of the Van Veldes (first Geer then Bram) that Beckett began to formalize this desire to translate the pictorial question into dramaturgical terms. Thus it was that he rejected Nicolas de Staël's set design for Godot, since: “the set must come out of the text without adding anything to it. As for the visual comfort of the audience, you can imagine how much I care. Do you really think you can listen with the backdrop of Bram's set, or see anything other than him?” (Letter to Georges Duthuit, 1952).
When he met Geer in 1937, “Beckett was going through a major existential crisis and had just been reworking his first novel, Murphy, which had been rejected by a great many publishers. He was lost in alcohol, leaving Ireland and moving once and for all to Paris” (Le Pictural dans l'œuvre de Beckett, Lassaad Jamoussi). He returned from a long artistic journey in Germany, where he was marked by classical works as well as contemporary art – it was during this journey that he discovered Caspar David Friedrich's Two Men Contemplating the Moon, his source for Waiting for Godot.
Art was thus at the heart of his creative thinking and the friendship that would tie him to Geer and later his brother Bram and their sister Jacoba (with whom his relationship may have been more than merely friendly), and which would profoundly influence his life and writing. His first writing on art is a short piece on Geer Van Velde, whose works he pressed on his new lover Peggy Guggenheim when she set up her new London gallery. Despite the relative failure of the exhibition (which followed Kandinsky's), he got his friend a one-year scholarship from Peggy. James Knowlson even thinks that “if Beckett maintained close links with Peggy for a long time, it was first and foremost because she could be convinced to give his artist friends a serious helping hand, starting with Geer Van Velde” (in Beckett, p. 474). Enigmatic, the little piece that Beckett wrote at the time at Peggy's request already contained a dramaturgical kernel of thought: “ Believes painting should mind its own business, i.e. colors. i.e no more say Picasso than Fabritius, Vermeer. Or inversely.”
Slower to develop, his friendship with Bram and interest in the latter's painting slowly changed Beckett's outlook on Geer's art and when, ten years after his first meeting the brothers, he wrote The World and the Trousers, Beckett brought up to date a duality symbolized by the title, taken from an anecdote given as a legend to the article. The world is the “imperfect” work of God, made in six days, to which the tailor compares the perfection of his trousers, made over six months.
The link between this anecdote and the Van Velde brothers is perhaps to be found in the second essay Beckett devoted to them, in 1948, Peintres de l'empêchement [Painters of the Problem] (Derrière le miroir n° 11/12) : “One of them said: I cannot see the object in order to represent it because I am who I am. There are always two sorts of problems – the object-problem and the ‘eye-problem…Geer Van Velde is an artist of the former sort…Bram Van Velde of the latter.”
Resistance of the object or impotence of the artist, this tale, the “true primary narrative core in kôan zen form,” (P. Vilar) would later find itself scattered throughout Beckett's work and would more specifically take centre stage in Endgame, whose similarity, by the by, with the art of Geer Van Velde was noted by Roger Blin. “At the time, he was friends with the Dutch brothers Geer and Bram Van Velde, both painters. Geer was a painter in the style of Mondrian. I have the feeling that Beckett saw Endgame as a painting by Mondrian with very tidy partitions, geometric separations and musical geometry,” (R. Blin, Conversations avec Lynda Peskine in Revue d'Esthétique).

Beckett's growing affinity for Bram Van Velde's work and the energy he put into promoting his work, especially to the galerie Maeght or his friend the art historian Georges Duthuit, was no doubt to the detriment of his relationship with Geer. Nonetheless, despite some misunderstandings, their friendship remained unbroken; as did the silent but anxious dialogue that the writer maintained with the art of the younger Van Velde brother, two of whose large canvases he owned. “The big painting by Geer finally gave me a sign. Shame that it should have turned out so badly. But perhaps that's not true after all” (letter to Georges Duthuit, March 1950). “Geer shows great courage. Ideas that are a little cutting, but maybe only in appearance. I have always had a great respect for them. But not enough, I think” (letter to Mania Péron, August 1951)
The death of Geer Van Velde in 1977 affected Beckett deeply and coincided with a period of intense nostalgia during which the writer decided to give himself over to “a great clear-out” of his house so as to live between “walls as grey as their owner.” Confiding his state of mind to his friend, the stage designer Jocelyn Herbert, Beckett bore witness to the indefatigable affection he had nurtured for the painter over forty years: “more canvases on display, including the big Geer Van Velde behind the piano.”
A precious witness to the friendship of these fellow travelers who had, ever since checking the veracity of the game of chess played by Murphy and Mr. Endon for Beckett's first novel, tackled together the great challenges of modernity: “It's that, deep down, they don't care about painting. What they're interested in is the human condition. We'll come back to that” (Beckett on the Van Velder brothers in The World and the Trousers).
Spine lightly sunned as usual for Molloy and L'Innomable, a tiny tear (not serious) to foot of spine of the latter.

First edition of the French translation by Robert Pinget, one of 80 numbered copies on pur fil, the only large paper copies.
A good copy.

New edition.

Contemporary binding in full blonde calf. Spine with five raised bands decorated with gilt compartments and fleurons as well as a red morocco title-label. All edges red speckled.
Leaves of the first part entirely browned, due to paper of inferior quality compared to the rest of the volume.

Famous edition from the collection of French poets published by Coustelier. The works follow in this order: Les Repues franches. Le Franc Archier de Baignollet. Le Dialogue de messieurs de Mallepaye, et de Baillevant, Lettre à Monsieur de ***, en lui envoyant la nouvelle édition des Œuvres de François Villon et Le Petit Testament de F. Villon, thus titled without the author's consent, as he states in the second book. According to the "notice to readers" the first part, (that is to say in our edition the second and third), was published following Clément Marot's edition, with the difference that various readings drawn from editions anterior to the latter have been placed in the margins. The footnotes marked with letters are by Clément Marot, those marked with numbers are by another hand.

The first edition published only in paperback format, of which there were no deluxe copies, one of the Service de Presse (advance) copies.
Moving and precious signed autograph inscription from Maurice Blanchot to his sister Marguerite on a card mounted on the first endpaper: "Chère Marg, ce livre qui n'est pas un livre mais qui te dit en ces jours si sombres, ma fidèle, ma profonde affection. Maurice." ["Dear Marg, this book which is not a book but which tells you in these dark days, my faithful one, my deep affection. Maurice."]
Envelope bearing Marguerite Blanchot's address written by her brother Maurice mounted on the half-title page. Marguerite Blanchot, renowned organist at the cathedral of Chalon, remained all her life in the family home, with her mother and aunt. "She gradually became, for the family, like the memory of origins." Very close to Maurice, she corresponded regularly with the writer who showed her great gratitude for her devotion to their invalid mother. While Blanchot's intense affection for his mother and sister shows through in his dedications, we know almost nothing of their relationship. In the only biographical essay on Blanchot, Christophe Bident reveals however: "Marguerite Blanchot venerated her brother Maurice. Very proud of him, (...) she attached great importance to his political ideas (...). She read a great deal (...) They telephoned each other, corresponded. At a distance, they shared the same natural authority, the same concern for discretion." Blanchot indeed sent her numerous works from his library, maintaining with her a continuous intellectual bond. A marginal crease at foot of first cover.
Handsome copy.

First edition, one of 125 numbered copies on Japan paper, deluxe issue.
Signed autograph inscription by Jehan Rictus to Félix Rey enhanced with an autograph poem.
Work illustrated, as frontispiece, with a portrait of the author signed in pencil by Steinlen and etched.
Endpapers lightly and partially shaded, handsome full-margined copy.

First edition, one of 150 numbered copies on Japan paper, the only deluxe copies.
Half black box calf binding with corners, smooth spine, original wrappers and spine preserved, top edge gilt, retaining deckled edges.
Our copy contains only one state of the original drypoint by Steinlen.
A handsome copy in excellent condition.

First edition, one of 150 numbered copies on Japan paper, the only deluxe copies.
Half red morocco with corners, spine with five raised bands, date at foot, covers and spine preserved, top edge gilt on deckled edges, J. Laurent's bookplate pasted to verso of front board, binding signed by Devauchelle.
Our copy includes the original Steinlen drypoint in two states.
The work is enhanced with a recto-verso autograph note from the author addressed to one of his friends.
Fine copy perfectly established.