First edition, one of 40 copies printed on Crèvecoeur du Marais paper, the only copies on deluxe paper.
A pleasant copy, despite a faint sunning at the foot of the spine.
New edition. A steel-engraved portrait frontispiece, printed on China paper and mounted. Printed in very small type, arranged in two columns.
Full polished blond calf binding, signed by Thouvenin at foot of spine. Smooth spine with blind-stamped Gothic architectural elements heightened with gilt dots, gilt fillets and title. Covers blind-stamped with a large Gothic window surrounded by architectural ornaments. Multiple blind-ruled frames with corner fleurons and gilt fillets. Inner dentelles. All edges gilt. Joints discreetly cracked at head. Some foxing and occasional browning to a few pages. Minor rubbing. Spine slightly dulled. A handsome copy.
New edition, one of the review copies.
A handsome copy.
Lengthy signed autograph inscription from Gabriel Matzneff to his friend, the Belgian literary critic Pol Vandromme: "Pour Pol Vandromme que j'aimerais beaucoup revoir à Paris ou lors d'un de mes prochains séjours en Belgique, ce roman qui s'est, en onze ans, bonifié, comme le vin, avec mon très amical et fidèle souvenir. Gabriel Matzneff."
First edition, one of 80 numbered copies on Hollande paper, the deluxe issue.
Fine copy.
The first edition, an advance [service de presse] copy.
A fine inscription from Jean Cocteau to Jean-Paul Sartre: “son ami de tout cœur [your true friend].”
Despite not being of the same generation, and despite everything that could have separated them, Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre were friendly in the late 40s and early 50s. When Sartre died, Jean Marais evoked their regular telephone calls and dinners with endless, wonderful discussions.
The two also worked together for recognition for Jean Genet and in July 1948 published an open letter together in Combat, addressed to the President of France, Vincent Auriol, urging the release from prison of the poet-thug. A few years later, Cocteau would help Sartre set up a committee of support for Henri Martin, a Communist protesting against the war in Indochina, sentenced to five years in prison for distributing pamphlets. Cocteau also took part in the staging of Sartre's Dirty Hands at the Théâtre Antoine in 1948.
In giving the high priest of Existentialism an inscribed copy of The Difficulty of Being, the indefatigable dandy was giving him one of his most intimate pieces. In this work, Sartre's political engagement is evoked in poetic terms: “but why does he insist on visible engagement? The invisible engages so much more…Poets engage themselves without any goal other than to lose themselves.”
Rare testimony of the links between two major figures of the 20th century intellectual and literary world.
First edition, one of 450 numbered copies on Corsican paper.
A pleasant copy, despite the spine and covers being slightly and marginally toned, as often.
Second French edition, published one month after the first, with no copies printed on deluxe paper.
A handsome copy.
Inscribed, dated and signed by Elia Kazan to Jean-Pierre Damase.
First edition, one of 41 numbered copies on Hollande paper, the leading issue.
A fine copy.
First edition on ordinary paper.
Spine creased as often, otherwise a pleasant copy.
Illustrated.
Inscribed and signed by Jean Marais to Madame Romanini.
First edition, with no copies printed on deluxe paper.
A pleasant copy.
On the half-title page, autograph inscription signed by Jean-Claude Carrière to the writer, essayist, and pianist Catherine David: "... qui m'ouvrît avec grâce la lourde porte du temps, je m'incline sur son passage avec amitié."
On the front endpaper, autograph inscription signed by Umberto Eco to the same recipient.
First edition, printed on laid paper.
Contemporary bottle green half shagreen binding, spine faded, with five raised bands framed by black fillets and adorned with gilt lyres, some rubbing to spine, marbled paper boards, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, gilt top edge.
Frontispiece portrait of Camille Saint-Saëns.
Inscribed and signed by Camille Saint-Saëns to A. Lasserre, inspector at the Opéra Garnier.
First edition. 14 full-page plates including two folding, numerous illustrations in the text, as well as twelve pages of tables with hieroglyphic and Chinese characters.
Beige calf binding, elaborately gilt spine, boards stamped with the arms of the Society of Writers to the Signet. Minor foxing. Spine, corners and spine-ends restored, some wear to spine and boards.
A rare copy of this abundantly illustrated treasure trove of esoteric science, serving as an initiation into the mysteries of Egypt through the study of hieroglyphics.
One of the rarest and most interesting works by Pierre Lacour, a painter, engraver and literary scholar who succeeded his father as professor and director of the Bordeaux School of Painting. Lacour is known for his studies of ancient monuments, Hebrew and ancient languages; only a year before Champollion's deciphering of hieroglyphics, Lacour claims in these pages to find passages from the Bible in Egyptian texts. His study namely suggests a hieroglyphic meaning for the name of Moses.
Provenance: arms of the Society of Writers to the Signet, association of Scottish lawyers founded in the late 16th century. Library shelf label pasted to the flyleaf.
First edition, one of 38 numbered copies on alfa paper, the only deluxe copies issued.
A very handsome copy.
First edition, one of 120 numbered copies on laid paper, deluxe copy.
Handsome copy.
First edition printed in 36 copies with a frontispiece portrait of the author, one of 30 numbered copies on vellum, the only issue after 1 Japan and 5 Holland paper copies.
Admirably printed, this extremely rare bibliophilic object is particularly precious for its complementarity with the first edition of Voyage au bout de la nuit.
Handsome copy presented in a full beige cloth chemise (with light dampstaining at foot) which appears to be the publisher's slipcase.
Bookplate affixed to verso of front cover.
Original autograph signed and dated manuscript by Paul Claudel, for his preface to Jacques Rivière's 'A la trace de Dieu'. Seventeen and a half pages in black ink on five double leaves.
A few words crossed out and rewritten. Horizontal fold, some foxing to the first page, pencil notes by a bibliographer on the last blank page. The preface, dated June 1925, first appeared in Le Correspondant on September 25, 1925, then with Rivière's Carnets published the same year by his wife under the title 'A la trace de Dieu' (Gallimard, pp. 9-24).
Complete manuscript of Paul Claudel's moving preface to the notebooks kept by Jacques Rivière during his captivity in WW1. The writer pays homage to a book which would have become a treatise on Christian Apologetics - had its author not met an untimely death at the age of 39.
As early as 1907, Claudel had played an important role in his conversion and religious journey. He kept up a correspondence with the young critic, now director of Gallimard's prestigious Nrf, until his sudden death in 1924. In the manuscript, he introduces Rivière's writings from his three years in the Kœnigsbrück and Hülseberg prison camps, after his capture during the Battle of Eton in August 1914. In the form of notes he intended for prisoner reunions, it contains a profound reflection on the search for God and the means to encounter Him. Although fo or Jacques Rivière, "God remains a fact": after a long theological quest and many reversals, he had reached the pinnacle of his faith during the war years. The deaths of his friends and writers Alain-Fournier and Péguy, piety of his wife Isabelle and feeling of being supported by God during those difficult days, all contributed to giving him a living faith which the poet-playwright Claudel celebrates in these beautiful pages. Rivière recognized the presence of a personal God in his life, and believed in the value of prayer and self-discipline, to which Claudel had urged him from their earliest exchanges. These Carnets are the ultimate proof of Claudel's influence: "Rivière's end was completely illuminated by the doctrine revealed to him by the great Christian poet" (Paul Beaulieu). Claudel devotes magnificent passages to Rivière's communion on Christmas Day 1913, which publicly marked his return to Catholicism: "All I can say is that Jacques Rivière's life seems to me to be one of those that cannot be explained solely by itself, but by the good or bad teaching it contains, because it is the type in which a host of others are realized and informed, that it has the value of a parable. It is the best illustration of that Providence whose hand he never ceased to feel upon him, that humble, gentle Providence, always present and always unexpected, infinitely patient, ingenious and artistic, of which he spoke so well. It was this Providence that led this good soul through the pilgrimage of Intelligence from the confusion of adolescence to that Christmas day in 1913, when, in an act of deference to the most extravagant theories, from Darwin to Freud, which presented themselves to them with the character of the latest fashion in which the noble deliberation of judgment had more share than the exigency of feeling, he came to kneel at the feet of the holy priest of Clichy".
The preface doubling as a eulogy reflects the dialogue between father and spiritual son. Despite their disagreements, Claudel admired Rivière's thinking and his objective vision of the Catholic Church in relation to secular society - without seeing it as the guardian of social conservatism, like far-right writers like Maurras or Barrès: "Among Jacques Rivière's models, the one that has been studied the furthest, and which stands out the best as a whole, is the study he has entitled: Le Catholicisme et la Société (Catholicism and Society). He develops ideas that will seem subversive to many, but which it was more necessary today than ever to set out. To oppose, we might say, rather than to posit, not as the absolute truth, but as the necessary antithesis of a thesis no less deficient in itself, which we see with regret taking on the value of an indisputable principle and fact among certain publicists. What platitudes, what nauseating tirades have we had to absorb on the social value of Christianity, on the help it brings to the established order and to sacrosanct "tradition", on the appeasement it provides to employers and landlords, on its natural alliance with the Constituted Authorities! How unbelievably condescending it is to be allowed to take its place alongside Auguste Comte among the Caryatids who are called upon to support the throne of the Goddess Nation! For some spirits, social order is not an ill-cut slope, a precarious and mediocre compromise whose injustices are all too visible, but one that is practically justified insofar as it serves God all the same, by the peace as it is that it brings to the greatest number, and by the humble facilities it provides for the all-important matter of salvation: Conservation, the good of he who has, is for them the first principle, a thing so sure and so beautiful that it is from it that Religion borrows most of its virtue and truth. "
Claudel joins Rivière on the question of Divine Providence, finding signs in every aspect of his life: "Man is free in the midst of a world that is not. He has to coordinate his own movement with a multitude of movements that do not depend on him. He has under his feet, amidst a multitude of companions, a moving floor. He collaborates with a Providence which, in the manner of a slope, drives events, which regulates the direction and rhythm of their progress, but which does not dispense with his intervention as a Volunteer for the realization of his designs, and which deals with him through a delicate system of refusals and provocations." The seventeen pages of this preface celebrate Rivière's pioneering spirit in his relationship with religion - Claudel even portraying him as a hero from a Jules Verne adventure novel:
"There is probably not one of my readers who does not know that admirable novel by Jules Verne, L'Ile mystérieuse. Castaways are thrown onto an unknown island, where they believe they are alone and abandoned to their own resources. Then, at critical moments, help arrives from who knows where. A fire is lit, a crate full of tools washes ashore, a rope is thrown from a rock, enemies are exterminated. None of these events can be explained in a more or less natural way, and the coarsest minds in the company are content to benefit from this occult collaboration without bothering to look for the author. But not the engineer Cyrus Smith. We see him in a moving engraving, suspended, lantern in hand, at the end of a rope ladder at the bottom of a well, surveying this black water from which at certain moments seemed to him to emanate suspicious noises and movements. (In fact, this is where every evening Captain Nemo, emerging from his underwater hermitage, comes to indulge in the human voice). Then things go wrong, and the lamentable moment arrives, dreaded by all readers of novels, of the explanation, which is always so inferior to our expectations. Rivière's attitude is analogous to that of Cyrus Smith"
Four months after Rivière's death, Claudel writes here a magnificent ode to his spiritual and literary encounter with Rivière, a "spirit on the march towards truth".
