Les chants de Maldoror

LAUTRéAMONT, Isidore Ducasse, Comte de
Les Chants de Maldoror [The Songs of Maldoror] Chez tous les libraires, Paris & Bruxelles 1874, 120 x 190 mm
(4 3/4 x 7 1/2 ”), full morocco gilt, custom slipcase
The rare first edition, with the cover and title dated 1874.
Superb black morocco by Semet & Plumelle, spine in six compartments with septuple blind-ruled compartments, gilt date to foot, gilt roulettes to head- and tail-pieces, 12 blind-ruled fillet frame to covers, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, large gilt dentelle frame to pastedowns, gilt fillets to edges of covers, covers and spine preserved, all edges gilt, slipcase edged in black morocco over marbled paper boards.
Printed in 1869 by Lacroix, this edition was not circulated for sale for fear of the censor. Only a dozen copies were sewn into paper covers and sent to the author (five have been located so far). In 1874, Jean-Baptiste Rozez, another publisher-bookseller in Belgium, acquired the stock and published the work with a cover and title page with the date 1874, and with no imprint.
It was in his bookshop that the poets of La Jeune Belgique would first discover this text.
Literature of the void that takes us to the edge of the bearable, with an adolescent outspokenness and a total darkness, the Chants de Maldoror, or the epic of an evil figure wandering through the world, became famous thanks to the Surrealists who made it a veritable aesthetic manifesto.
Provenance : from the collection of François Ragazzoni with his ex-libris to one endpaper.
A fine copy in a splendid morocco binding by Semet & Plumelle, retaining its covers.