L'amour fou

First edition, one of 9 numbered copies on japon, only deluxe issue aside from 35 copies on pur fil, and a few on coloured paper.

Full black morocco binding, flat spine, author’s name palladium-stamped, title stamped lengthwise in palladium and blind, grey long-grain shagreen inlays to boards with author and title stamped lengthwise in palladium and in blind, turn-ins framed in morocco, light plum suede pastedowns and flyleaves, three palladium decorated deckled edges, outstanding custom binding by Thomas Boichot.

Illustrated with 20 photographs, including 7 photographs by Man Ray, 4 by Brassaï, one each by Dora Maar, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Rogi André, as well as artworks by Max Ernst, and the statue of a “female character” by Giacometti, in which the writer saw “the very emanation of the desire to love and to be loved in search of its real human object, in its painful ignorance”.

André Breton offers a meditation on love at first sight and passion, drawn from his fateful first encounter in 1934 with his future wife Jacqueline Lamba (“this woman was scandalously beautiful”). Recalling the beginnings of their romantic relationship, he reflects on chance and embarks on a rereading of their love story, detecting all sorts of phantasmagoric signs, analysing his experiences and feelings. He concludes with an open letter to their daughter Aube, born in December 1935, which ends with these words: “I want you to be madly loved”.

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A masterpiece of Surrealist literature, both an extension and opposite of Nadja which was published nine years earlier — also considered an “objectbook, in the classic surrealist style, interleaved with photographs, by Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, and Man Ray [...] It proves its own startling kind of existence in the real world, being not just a book, not just the record of an extraordinary love that between André Breton and the artist with whom he shared his life — but an object inserted madly and really, now in our world” (Mary Ann Caws, Translator’s note, Mad Love, University of Nebraska Press, 1987).