Le clavecin de Diderot - Exemplaire de Georges Auric

First edition, one of 200 numbered copies on “light green paper,” the only deluxe paper issue announced.

Turquoise half morocco binding, smooth spine, date in gilt at foot, marbled paper boards, endpapers, and pastedowns, original wrappers and spine preserved, top edge gilt; an elegant contemporary binding signed by G. Gauché.

A very handsome copy, finely bound by Georges Gauché and complete with its publisher's prospectus. 

Signed presentation inscription by René Crevel: "My dear Georges, here, in its finest form: Diderot’s Harpsichord, if you can help him play his music? With all my affection. René" (our own translation)

This playful inscription is not the first the author penned for composer Georges Auric for this work. Another copy bears the presentation inscription: "To Nora, because she speaks her mind, to Georges in memory of Grimaud." Here Crevel presents his friend with a deluxe copy, "in its finest form." 

By 1932, the two men had known each other for some five years. As Jean-Michel Devésa recounts in René Crevel, ou, L'esprit contre la raison, the Surrealist writer was impressed by Georges Auric's "flawless memory," as well as his literary gifts and musical virtuosity. 

Crevel, unlike Auric, "had little interest in music." In Diderot’s Harpsichord, the author stays true to form. He dedicates to Paul Éluard and André Breton a political -not musical - pamphlet, written to reconcile Surrealism with Communism, which he had joined in 1927, the year he met Auric. The 1932 publication of Diderot’s Harpsichord came just months before the official break between these two movements and the expulsion of Crevel and his fellow Surrealists from the Communist Party.

In developing his argument, René Crevel draws on a metaphor from Denis Diderot. Before him, Lenin, in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, had borrowed this image from the Encyclopedist.

A deluxe copy containing a splendid witty presentation inscription from the author, almost certainly to his friend Georges Auric, whom he admired for his countless talents.