Voyage au bout de la nuit

First edition, one of the press copies.

Full emerald-green morocco, flat spine with a gilt rule lengthwise, title and author gilt-stamped, frontdecorated with multiple gilt rules framing a central onlaid panel of blue shagreen, light green suede endpapers and pastedowns, original wrappers preserved, top edge gilt, binding signed Boichot.

Exceptional and highly desirable presentation copy inscribed and signed by Louis-Ferdinand Céline: "A mons. Pierre Jean Jouve cordial hommage Louis Celine."

To the best of our knowledge, this inscription to the writer and poet Pierre Jean Jouve had never previously been recorded. Céline and Jouve were both creators of novel series woven from the very fabric of life: works of autofiction whose substance is at once personal and universal. One must also emphasise the formative influence of Freud on both Voyage and Jouve’s Vagadu, published the previous year. Upon the publication of Voyage, Céline hailed Freud as "notre maître à tous" [the master of all] (Cahiers Céline, I, p. 88.). Céline’s masterpiece indeed lays bare multiple primal drives in spectacular fashion, while Vagadu openly retraces the stages of a Freudian psychoanalysis. Both writers drew upon Freudian thought without ever becoming subservient to it; their use of free association, interlocking deliriums, and traumatic neurosis profoundly shaped the wanderings of their characters, contributing to a shared determination to strip away the rational and moral mask of the individual:

"All our unhappiness is due to having to remain Tom, Dick and Harry, cost what it may, throughout a whole series of years. The bodies we possess, a fancy dress of twitching, trivial molecules, revolt unceasingly against this frightful farce of managing to last. They want to be off, these molecules of ours, and lose themselves, as quick as they can, in the universe at large: little beauties! They hate just being 'us', mere cuckolds of the Infinite!"

Handsome copy of Céline's most notorious novel, inscribed to a fellow writer and enthusiast of the unconscious, housed in an elegant Art Deco style binding.