Calligrammes

First edition, one of the first issue numbered press copies.
Binding in half brown morocco, spine in five compartments, gilt date at the foot, marbled paper boards, endpapers in the same paper, top edge gilt on the rough, wrappers and spine in perfect preserved condition.
Second major collection of the poet-soldier with new graphic innovations and illustrated frontispiece with a portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire by Pablo Picasso.
“Quelques-uns des meilleurs poèmes de guerre, toutes langues confondues, sont réunis dans ce recueil, à côté d'oeuvres expérimentales comme Les Fenêtres (proche du cubisme) et La Jolie
Rousse, qui étaient très en avance sur leur temps” “Some of the best war poems, in all languages, are brought together in this collection, alongside experimental works such as Les Fenêtres (close to Cubism) and La Jolie Rousse, which were far ahead of their time” (Cyril Connolly, Cent livres-clés de la littérature moderne, nº 32).
A beautiful copy on non-brittle paper which is infrequent, rare and surprising handwritten presentation signed by Guillaume Apollinaire?: “à monsieur le critique littéraire de La Libre Parole, hommage de Guill. Apollinaire.? “To the literary critic of La Libre Parole, tribute by Guill. Apollinaire.?”
Who could be the recipient of this dedication, unnamed but addressed to a collaborator of the famous anti-Semitic newspaper by Édouard Drumont?
We know the ostensibly philo-Semitic position of Guillaume Apollinaire. In an 1899 letter, he boasts to Toussaint Luca that he tried to provoke Henri Rochefort, who was reading La Libre parole, by deploying L'Aurore in front of him but, as the young Dreyfusard regrets, without daring to engage the controversy. In 1902, he publicly marked his fraternity with the Jewish people with a new publication in La Revue blanche, Le Passant de Prague?: “?J'aime les juifs car tous les juifs souffrent partout?” “I love Jews because all Jews suffer everywhere”. Then in Alcool, he will dedicate a poem to the Hebrew religion?: La Synagogue. But it is undoubtedly through his poem “?Le Juif latin?”, published in 'Hérésiarque et C^ie that Apollinaire poetically reveals the essence of his particular link with Judaism: that he shares the condition of eternal stranger, the feeling of uprooting and the search for identity.
It may, therefore, seem very surprising that this poet, whose only trace of political commitment was in favour of Dreyfus, dedicated his work to a La Libre parole journalist, even if he is a literary critic. And in fact, La Libre Parole does not contain literary columns?!
A few months before the poet's death, this laconic dedication thus proves to be a formidable and final scoff of poetic impertinence to political intolerance...