All Products

L’esprit contre la raison is a brief, vehement text from the heart of French Surrealism. René Crevel writes here not as a systematic philosopher, but as a polemicist intent on disturbing the order of reason, morality and bourgeois clarity. The book was published in 1927 by Les Cahiers du Sud, a review and publishing circle receptive to literary experiment beyond the Parisian centre. Pavel Tchelitchew’s frontispiece portrait gives the volume a strong visual presence and links Crevel’s voice to the cosmopolitan artistic world of the 1920s. In its original wrappers, the copy preserves the sober, nervous materiality of a text that reads more like an assault than a treatise. Its status as a review copy also marks it as a book meant to move through the literary networks of its moment.

Some Los Angeles Apartments is one of Ed Ruscha’s iconic early artist’s books, devoted to the banal architecture of Los Angeles. Instead of monuments, drama or urban glamour, Ruscha shows ordinary apartment buildings, coolly photographed and without visible sentimentality. This second edition of 1970, printed in 3,000 unnumbered copies, confirms the wider circulation of his conceptual book form. The small format, sober wrappers and original glassine wrapper make it an essential Ruscha object.

Les Dentelles de Montmirail is one of the characteristic small masterpieces born of the collaboration between René Char and PAB. It was published in 1960 between L’Isle-sur-Sorgue and Alès, two places that immediately evoke the geography of Char and that of Pierre André Benoit. The edition joins Char’s brief, aphoristic lyric voice to five natural impressions from Montmirail, so that text and matter quite literally meet. With PAB, poetry often takes on an intimate, almost handmade form, and that quality is especially palpable here. The limited issue on Arches heightens the book’s discreet yet unmistakable bibliophile character. This copy gains further importance from the autograph inscription to Dr Marcel Zara, far more than a routine dedication and almost readable as a small autonomous poem. For collectors, it is an exemplary PAB production in which landscape, trace, inscription, and poem become a single object.

Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques is one of Blaise Cendrars’ striking early publications, bringing together poetry, modernity and typographic boldness. The collection appeared in 1919 with Au Sans Pareil, a publisher closely associated with the literary avant-garde of post-war Paris. Its frontispiece, a portrait of Cendrars by Amedeo Modigliani, gives the book exceptional artistic resonance. The encounter between Cendrars’ mobile, cosmopolitan poetry and Modigliani’s restrained line makes this more than a book of poems: it is a document of friendship, milieu and moment. This copy is an unnumbered exemplaire de passe on vélin d’Alfa, outside the numbered justification. Its partly unopened condition further enhances its character as a preserved bibliophile object.

With Le Pèse-Nerfs followed by Fragments d’un Journal d’Enfer, Antonin Artaud emerges in 1927 as a writer of inner derangement. This early edition was published in Marseille by Les Cahiers du Sud as the fifth title in the Critique series. It belongs among the first books in which Artaud’s broken, nervous and visionary voice appears in full force. The text moves between prose, note, incantation and self-investigation. André Masson’s frontispiece places the work in direct proximity to the Surrealist milieu. As a Lafuma copy, numbered 14 of 321, this edition carries both literary and bibliographical importance.

Juin 40 is a powerful illustrated war book in which Frans Masereel gives visual form, through 32 plates, to the French defeat and disarray of June 1940. The plates are preceded by Henry de Montherlant’s Fragments d’un journal de guerre 1940, so that text and image together create a double testimony: literary, historical and moral. Masereel, renowned for his woodcuts and wordless novels, here brings his expressive black-and-white drama to bear on an immediate historical trauma. The oblong format gives the plates a horizontal, almost cinematic space in which flight, soldiers, civilians and destruction can unfold. The book appeared in Paris with Pierre Tisné in 1942, in the midst of the war, giving it a special tension between memory, censorship, mourning and visual urgency. This copy, n°16, belongs to the first 350 copies on vélin Lana Bélier within a total edition of 1,550. It is an early and materially attractive copy of a book in which Masereel’s humanist graphic art retains its historical edge.

L’emploi du temps is a modest yet notably appealing poetry book from the late 1960s. Paul Mari’s text is given particular weight by the presence of Henri Goetz, whose signed original colour engraving moves the volume into the field of the modern artist’s book. Published by Éditions Chambelland in 1969, it appeared in a limited issue on pur fil paper. This copy, number 22 of 50, belongs to the deluxe variant with original print. It is made more distinctive by Paul Mari’s autograph presentation inscription to Susy Solidor, a figure with her own charged place in twentieth-century artistic and social culture. The combination of small limitation, signed print, inscription and avant-garde context makes the book relevant to The Hidden Page, even if Mari is less canonical than his illustrator.

Port d’eaux mortes is a particularly strong encounter between Pierre Mac Orlan’s literary world and the incisive visual language of Georges Grosz. Published in 1926 by Au Sans Pareil, it belongs to an interwar catalogue marked by modernity and bibliophilic daring. Mac Orlan’s imagination of ports, marginal lives and moral twilight is here set against Grosz’s nervous, satirical and metropolitan graphic art. The eight original lithographs make the volume more than an illustrated novel: it is a fully fledged modernist artist’s book. This copy, number 615, is one of 1000 on vélin Lafuma de Voiron within a total edition of 1260 copies. For The Hidden Page, its appeal is clear: a numbered original edition with original prints by a key figure of Berlin Dada and Neue Sachlichkeit.

*Les Mamelles de Tirésias* is a key book of the historical avant-garde: Apollinaire’s “drame surréaliste” appeared in 1918 from SIC, shortly after the scandalous 1917 staging. The edition brings together text, image and music: Serge Férat’s drawings and Germaine Albert-Birot’s music make it more than a printed play. In its title and subtitle, the word “surréaliste” appears at a moment when it did not yet name a movement, but a poetic possibility. The book therefore stands at the threshold between Cubist theatrical renewal, Dadaist disruption and the Surrealism to come. This copy on ordinary paper is bound in turquoise-green half leather, with gilt spine and the original wrappers preserved. Its provenance is notable: the circular blind stamp “Bibliothèque de Jean Cassou”, with the “JC” monogram, places the copy in the library of an important writer, critic, museum director and Resistance figure. A foundational avant-garde book is thus linked to a second layer of French cultural history.

With Héliogabale ou l’Anarchiste couronné, Antonin Artaud wrote one of his most feverish and idiosyncratic historical books. The young Roman emperor Heliogabalus is not treated as the subject of calm biography, but as a focal point for power, ritual, sexuality, religion and decomposition. The book appeared in 1934 from Denoël & Steele, with six wood-engraved vignettes by André Derain. These modest illustrative interventions give the volume a tension that is both archaic and modern. Artaud approaches antiquity as a mirror for anarchy and sacred reversal, not as antiquarian reconstruction. The work remains an exceptional meeting point of literature, historical imagination and avant-garde obsession.