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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.

Les Pays égarés is an early and rare publication by Max Bucaille, issued in 1937 by René Debresse under the imprint Le Loup Pendu. The book belongs to that pre-war territory where poetry, visual experiment and Surrealist sensibility meet on an intimate scale. Its seven impressions on green glossy paper give the modest octavo volume an unusual visual intensity. Bucaille’s imagination here is not merely literary but also plastic: poem and image seem to open a lost inner landscape together. This copy is especially meaningful because of the autograph inscription to Georges Hugnet, poet, artist, publisher and a key figure of the Surrealist milieu. The date, 18 December 1937, places the copy close to publication and gives it the warmth of a direct artistic transmission.

De la typographie et de l’harmonie de la page imprimée is a refined fin-de-siècle publication devoted to the art of the printed page. Lucien Pissarro and Charles Ricketts place William Morris at the centre as a reformer of the book, printing and the applied arts. The work belongs to the circles in which the Arts and Crafts movement, private press ideals and the renewed valuation of typography meet. The title makes clear that typography is not treated as a technical accessory, but as an harmony of type, margin, paper and page design. The edition appeared in 1898, in London from Ricketts and in Paris from Floury, standing between English private press culture and French bibliophile reception. This copy belongs to the issue of 250 copies on Arnold handmade laid paper within a total edition of 256 copies. The present errata slip and only slight corner wear make it bibliographically attractive and complete.

La Noce massacrée belongs to Jean Cocteau’s early, sharply modernist phase, shortly after Parade and in close proximity to Raymond Radiguet. The book appeared in 1921 with À la Sirène, a publisher closely connected with the Parisian artistic avant-garde and literary modernism. The presence of a vignette after Picasso reinforces that context, although this is not an illustrated artist’s book in the strict sense. Cocteau writes from a milieu in which literature, theatre, ballet, visual art and social polemic constantly intersected. The printed dedication to Radiguet also makes the book a witness to a decisive friendship and intellectual alliance. This copy, n°XIX, belongs to the first 40 copies on vergé d’Arches, the most desirable form of the edition.

La Belle et la Bête. Journal d’un film is one of the finest encounters between book, cinema and poetic self-reflection in Cocteau’s oeuvre. It appeared in 1946, the same year in which his filmed fairy tale gave decisive form to the post-war imagination. In this journal Cocteau records the practical, bodily and magical labour behind the film: fatigue, sets, actors, technical constraints and moments of unexpected grace. The 24 hors-texte photogravure plates make the book not only a written testimony, but also a visual film object. They preserve the atmosphere of shadow, metamorphosis and theatrical enchantment that made the film famous. This copy is especially desirable as hors-commerce n°U on vélin pur fil Lafuma-Navarre within the large-paper issue. Its unopened state further strengthens its aura of untouched bibliophilic preservation.

La littérature et le mal is one of Georges Bataille’s most penetrating books on the moral and metaphysical stakes of literature. In these essays he examines how major writers approach the boundary between law and transgression, guilt and sovereignty, eroticism and destruction. The volume brings together Emily Brontë, Baudelaire, Michelet, Blake, Sade, Proust, Kafka and Genet in a radical reading of literature as an experience of the forbidden. For Bataille, the literary work is not a polite mirror of morality, but a place where human beings encounter their most dangerous freedom. This copy is remarkable for its paper issue: one of only 25 on vélin pur fil Lafuma-Navarre, the sole large-paper issue.

These two copies of Le Parti pris des choses form a remarkable paired witness to Francis Ponge’s visit to Zurich in March 1949. The book itself is one of the decisive prose works of French modernity: not lyrical confession, but a precise encounter with the mute dignity of things. Ponge gives ordinary objects — soap, bread, an oyster, a pebble, a cigarette — a language at once exact, ironic and sensuous. The double inscription to Frank Thiessing and to Madame Frank Thiessing gives the pair a strongly personal resonance. Frank C. Thiessing belonged to the Swiss world of graphic design, publishing and visual modernism, notably in relation to Hans Erni. These copies therefore connect Ponge’s literary materialism with the artistic and typographic networks of post-war Zurich.