Le bois du templier pendu

First edition, one of 290 numbered copies on pure thread paper, ours one of 20 hors commerce copies specially printed for Alin Laubreaux.
Light worming of no consequence to the final endpaper and to some deckled edges, handsome full-margined copy.
Very fine full-page autograph inscription signed by the author to Alin Laubreaux: "...vous avez vu naître ce livre, vous l'avez aidé à vivre, il vous appartient presqu'autant qu'à son père. Mais son père vous aime comme un fils et c'est tendrement mon petit Alin qu'avec un air bougon il vous serre sur son coeur..." ["...you have seen this book come to life, you have helped it to live, it belongs to you almost as much as to its father. But its father loves you like a son and it is tenderly my little Alin that with a gruff air he holds you to his heart..."]
Born in New Caledonia, Alin Laubreaux was a writer and journalist principally known for his theatrical reviews published in the ultra-collaborationist, anti-Semitic and fascist newspaper Je suis partout.
Hated by a good part of the Parisian artistic milieu, he was publicly slapped in June 1941 by Jean Marais whom he had called "l'homme au Cocteau entre les dents" after having savaged the playwright's latest play La machine à écrire. The scene was freely adapted by Louis Malle in his Le Dernier Métro. Alin Laubreaux was also accused of having played a significant role in the arrest by the Gestapo, then in the deportation of the poet Robert Desnos whom he execrated and who had also slapped him some years earlier. At the Liberation, he fled to Spain and was condemned to death in absentia in 1947.