L'Ermitage - Revue artistique et littéraire. Année complète 1902

First edition.
Publisher's Bradel binding in half dark green percale, smooth spine, black morocco title label, small gilt ornament and double gilt fillet at foot.
Twelve issues from January to December 1902. Original wrappers preserved.
Each issue is illustrated with a woodcut.
Literary contributions by Léon Blum ("Les yeux que j'aime"), Paul Fort, Henri Ghéon, André Gide ("Oscar Wilde"), Mme Alphonse Daudet, Walt Whitman, etc.
Founded in 1890 by Henri Mazel, L'Ermitage was a monthly journal belonging to the first wave of small symbolist reviews. In the 1895s, the journal entered a decline, and its new director, Edouard Ducoté, called upon André Gide. The editorial team was then reduced to twelve regular collaborators, friends of Gide. After multiple difficulties and attempts to reorganize the editorial team (Remy de Gourmont would spend time there and also contribute financially in 1905), L'Ermitage drew its last breath in 1906.
L'Ermitage managed to distinguish itself from other important journals of the time such as the Mercure de France or the Revue blanche because it claimed to be eclectic and apolitical; on its cover, one could read that it was "la seule Revue qui ne s'occupe ni de politique ni de sociologie [mais] qui traite uniquement de littérature et d'art." ["the only Review that deals neither with politics nor sociology [but] treats exclusively with literature and art."] Its small illustrations were in the Art Nouveau style, and, faithful to its symbolist spirit, its collaborators were more interested in poetry than in the novel.
Tiphaine Samoyault, French literary critic, considers that L'Ermitage expresses a transition straddling fin de siècle aestheticism and the avant-garde poetry of the 1910s.