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*Die Herberge im Heiligtum (Auberge dans le sanctuaire) und andere Gedichte* is a refined edition in which André Frénaud’s poetry and Raoul Ubac’s colour woodcuts meet in a sober, almost sacred space. The book was published in 1959 by Galerie Parnas in Wuppertal, a context that connects the French artist’s book with postwar German gallery culture. The title, with its tension between inn and sanctuary, lodging and withdrawal, is exceptionally well suited to Ubac’s mineral and architectural visual language. His six colour woodcuts do not illustrate the poems in a literal manner, but act as condensed signs of matter, silence and inner landscape. This copy, no. 9 3 from an edition of 150, is signed by both author and artist. It is further enriched with an original colour woodcut by Ubac, signed, dated 1959 and numbered E.A., giving the copy clear added distinction. For The Hidden Page, it is a strong example of the postwar poetic artist’s book, where text, printmaking and material restraint assume a concentrated form.

*Dix portraits* is an exceptional modernist portrait book in which Gertrude Stein brings together her English prose portraits with French translations by Georges Hugnet and Virgil Thomson. Published in 1930 by Éditions de La Montagne, with a preface by Pierre de Massot, the edition forms a compact cartography of Stein’s Parisian circle. The ten illustrations by Picasso, Tchelitchew, Bérard, Tonny and Berman make the volume a collective portrait of a milieu rather than a merely illustrated collection. This copy is no. 91, belonging to the illustrated series on vélin d’Arches, and is signed on the justification by Gertrude Stein, Georges Hugnet and Virgil Thomson, with a fourth unidentified inscription or paraph. Edward Wasserman’s bookplate adds a later collector’s provenance. The later orange binding gives the book an almost object-like presence, while its contents preserve a subtle network of friendship, modernism and portraiture.

This copy is additionally enriched with a drawing in blue ink and wash on the page accompanying the portrait of Christian Bérard, apparently signed ‘Christian Bérard’. The attribution to Bérard rests on style, colour and signature and remains subject to independent confirmation. This addition is described separately from the edition’s ten illustrations.

Corps et biens is a key collection by Robert Desnos and one of the major gathering points of his early poetic work. The book appeared in 1930 from the NRF, at a moment when Desnos had already been a central yet independent figure of Surrealism. The title joins bodies and goods, sensuality and loss, matter and dream: precisely the tensions in which Desnos’s poetry moves so powerfully. The volume brings together the lyric freedom of the Surrealist years with a personal voice that is more direct, musical and emotionally recognizable. This copy belongs to the head issue on vergé pur fil Lafuma, reserved for the bibliophiles of the NRF. It is number XLVIII and was printed for Dr. Sourdel, giving it a named bibliophile character. As a large-paper copy of the first edition, it is a highly desirable object within early French avant-garde and NRF culture.

*Crime à San-Francisco* brings together Durtain’s modern urban narrative and eight original lithographs by Georges Annenkoff. The novella follows the moral and social unravelling of a young bank clerk in 1920s San Francisco. Annenkoff gives the American metropolis a nervous, angular and psychologically charged visual language. Au Sans Pareil published this first edition in 1927 in a carefully tiered bibliophile issue. Copy no. 25 is one of twenty copies on Japon accompanied by a double suite. When complete, this state contains eight lithographs in the book and sixteen additional suite impressions. Its combination of luxury paper, original printmaking and extremely small limitation makes it a particularly desirable artist’s book.

This original December issue of *La Danse* served as the official programme for the thirteenth Russian season at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The publication combines the ephemeral nature of a theatre programme with the visual ambition of an avant-garde periodical. Its colour cover reproduces Picasso’s watercolour design for the Chinese costume in *Parade* and provides the issue’s immediately recognizable artistic focus. Inside are colour reproductions of costumes for *Shéhérazade* after Léon Bakst, a title illustration by Valentine Hugo and numerous photographs of dancers and productions. The issue records how Serge Diaghilev brought painting, music, choreography and publicity design together within a single modern conception of performance. The illustrations are reproductions rather than separate signed original prints. The red and grey-green typography remains crisp, while the cover colours show remarkably little fading for such a fragile publication. Despite its own signs of use, the surviving glassine has evidently protected the original wrappers.

De la méthode triolectique dans ses applications en situlogie générale is a small but charged theoretical pamphlet by Asger Jorn. It presents the “triolectical” method as an alternative to dialectical thinking and links that speculation to the Situationist imagination of play, space and conflict. Its material form is modest — 11 pages, stapled white wrappers, diagrams — but its importance lies precisely in its autonomous publication. Jorn’s text emerged from the broader context of Sauvagerie, Barbarie, Civilisation and the study of signs engraved on churches in Eure and Calvados, but here it is detached as a separate theoretical object. The Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism in Aarhus functions as Jorn’s idiosyncratic laboratory for art-historical sabotage, comparative visual culture and anti-academic research. This copy is not a deluxe edition and bears no numbering, signature or original graphic work. Its value lies in its rarity, its early autonomous publication form and its close relation to Jorn’s Situationist thought.

Chaval graveur. Phantasmes is a rare pataphysical homage to the graphic imagination of Chaval, the pseudonym of Yvan Francis Le Louarn. The book appeared on 4 Décervelage XCIX, corresponding to 1 January 1972, from the Collège de ’Pataphysique, and was printed by Imprimerie Union. It reproduces eighteen engravings in facsimile and adds a short catalogue raisonné, preceded by a presentation by Louis Barnier. Chaval’s world is dry, absurd, dark and precise at once: his phantasmatic figures may look like simple jokes, yet often have the sharpness of pocket-sized nightmares. This copy is especially notable: exemplaire VI, one of the 33 exemplaires lépidoptéraux, identifiable by the butterfly stamp. The ensemble also includes a loose reproduction print bearing the text “Exposition du 14 au 29 février 1972” and Chaval’s signature in the plate. The book thus becomes not only a facsimile edition, but also a small exhibition and reception dossier around Chaval within the pataphysical circle.

This edition of *Ci-gît précédé de La Culture indienne* was published in Paris in 1947 by K éditeur, during the final phase of Antonin Artaud’s life. Its small square format gives the book a concentrated physical presence, well suited to the intensity of Artaud’s late writings. The typographic layout was designed by Pierre Faucheux, who would later become a major figure in French book design. The volume is unpaginated and is often described as approximately [52] pages or [26] leaves. The total limitation was 450 copies, including 435 copies on vélin pur fil du Marais. This copy belongs to that paper issue and is numbered 339. As a book object, it brings together Artaud’s radical literary voice and a restrained, carefully staged post-war typographic presentation.

With *Le Cornet à dés*, Max Jacob published a decisive collection of his experimental prose poems in 1917. Its two prefaces, dated 1906 and 1916, reveal the book's long gestation and the development of Jacob's poetics. In brief, mercurial texts he combines everyday life with dream logic, wordplay, mysticism and grotesque humour. The collection emerged in close proximity to the Cubist circles of Montmartre while retaining a distinctly personal literary form. This ordinary-paper copy is remarkable for the addition of two signed autograph letters by the author. The first documents the financing, printing and projected publication of the book with exceptional precision, while the second mentions their mutual friend Georges Deniker. Roger Lefébure's bookplate adds a traceable provenance to a copy whose archival importance far outweighs the darkening and rubbing of its spine.

This original 1924 edition documents *Les Biches*, the sophisticated ballet created for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Texts by Jean Cocteau and Darius Milhaud place the work within the theatrical and musical culture of interwar Paris. Francis Poulenc composed the score, Bronislava Nijinska devised the choreography and Marie Laurencin designed the sets and costumes. The book contains a portrait of Nijinska by Cocteau, a facsimile page from Poulenc’s score and fourteen colour reproductions after Laurencin’s designs. These images are reproductions rather than separate original drawings or prints. Laurencin’s pale colours, elongated figures and restrained decorative elegance closely match the ballet’s poised ambiguity. Text, musical notation and costume design are thus combined in an early record of the Ballets Russes’ interdisciplinary practice. This numbered copy retains an attractive but seriously weakened later artistic binding.