L'Afrique fantôme

Rare first edition for which no large-paper copies were printed, one of the press copies.
Spine and boards lightly sunned as usual, a few light dampstains to the spine.
Illustrated with 32 photographic plates.
Precious autograph inscription signed by Michel Leiris to Gabrielle Gras, a discreet yet prolific critic for the Revue Europe, close to Surrealist circles and to numerous writers and artists.

The fruit of the journal Michel Leiris kept for nearly two years as secretary-archivist of the Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic expedition led by Marcel Griaule, L'Afrique fantôme quickly outgrew the confines of a mere scientific field diary to take on the character of an intimate journal, a tone that in fact caused a rift between the author and Griaule upon its publication. It has since become a classic of twentieth-century field literature, reissued and translated on several occasions, and was eventually included in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,

L'Afrique fantôme can above all boast the distinction of having been condemned to destruction by a decree of the Vichy regime in 1941, a rare fate for a work of this kind, which accounts for the current scarcity of copies of the first edition.

The dedicatee, Gabrielle Gras, remains a figure who cultivated great discretion. Although very much present in the circle of numerous artists, she is rarely mentioned outside her personal connections. In her memoirs, Elsa Triolet highlights her spirit of intellectual resistance during the Second World War: "À Nice même, Pierre Abraham et Gabrielle Gras avaient été amenés à tenir, rue de France, une librairie, vivante comme un journal clandestin, les passants y amenant des nouvelles de Paris et d'ailleurs."

Gabrielle Gras would indeed marry, in 1957, the writer and critic Pierre Abraham (1892-1974), brother of Jean-Richard Bloch and future director of the review Europe. Although little information about her survives today, she was in fact an early figure within publishing circles close to the French Communist Party: active before the war at the PCF's Bureau d'éditions, involved from 1945 in the founding of the Bibliothèque française alongside Aragon and Picasso, and later production manager at the Éditeurs français réunis, she also published a serialized novel in the pages of Europe.

A precious and rare first edition, issued without large-paper copies, of a foundational text bridging literature and ethnography, enriched with an autograph inscription to a dedicatee as elusive and fascinating as the Africa Michel Leiris bestows upon her.