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Roue libre is an important artist’s book by Pierre Alechinsky in Skira’s Les Sentiers de la création series. The title suggests movement without constraint: a free turning of line, memory, text and image. Alechinsky appears here not only as painter or printmaker, but as an author commenting from within his own visual universe. The richly illustrated edition reveals how his work emerges from traces, margins, circular movements, calligraphic impulses and unexpected associations. Skira’s series was designed precisely for such hybrid books, in which artists could unfold their method, imagination and studio-thinking in book form. This copy belongs to the numbered hardbound issue of 1000 copies and is numbered 554. It is therefore a strong and representative collector’s object from Alechinsky’s mature period, at the intersection of the Cobra legacy, informal art and the self-reflective artist’s book.

Le chien roi brings Michel Butor and Pierre Alechinsky together in a compact illustrated publication from the Repères / Cahiers d’art contemporain series. The book belongs to that late twentieth-century zone where artist’s book, gallery publication and literary image-essay overlap. Butor, one of the great renovators of the French novel and a tireless writer with artists, finds in Alechinsky a partner for whom line, writing and image are always in motion. The title is simple and enigmatic at once: the dog becomes king, sign, fable animal and occasion for a playful shift of power. The book appeared in Paris in 1984 from Daniel Lelong and comprises 41 illustrated pages. It is not a monumental deluxe edition, but a clear, carefully published encounter between two figures who understood the book as a site of collaboration. For The Hidden Page, its importance lies above all in the dialogue between postwar literary experiment and Alechinsky’s graphic poetics.

L’Afrique des impressions is Jean Ferry’s pataphysical guide to Raymond Roussel’s imaginary Africa, published by the Collège de ’Pataphysique in 1967. Its title openly plays on Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique, yet transforms exegesis into travel writing, scholarship into itinerary and reading into expedition. Ferry approaches Roussel not as an outside commentator, but as an initiate of verbal machinery, secret procedures and comic precision. This copy belongs to the rare group of 166 “exemplaires capitaux” on Authentique Papier Tropical du Ponukélé, and it duly contains the original drawing and autograph material required for that deluxe issue. Its dedication to Raphaël Ossona de Mendez places it within the living network of the Collège rather than in a merely external provenance. The accompanying manuscript note on codes, letters and the number 472 further heightens its Roussellian resonance. As a bibliophile object, it is at once guidebook, homage, private signal and pataphysical field instrument.

La Dragonne is the posthumous first edition of Alfred Jarry’s final novel, published in 1943 by Gallimard/N.R.F. with a preface by Jean Saltas. The book carries the tension of a text that long remained suspended between completion and fragment before taking printed form decades after Jarry’s death. It reveals Jarry’s late imaginative world through autobiographical echoes, Breton legend and Symbolist narrative structures. This copy is further distinguished by its green publisher’s decorated boards, designed after a model by Mario Prassinos, placing it within the bibliophile culture of NRF bindings. The combination of a posthumous Jarry text, an artist-designed binding and a numbered copy on Alfa Mousse gives the volume particular appeal. It is not an illustrated artist’s book in the strict sense, but an object in which literature, publishing history and binding design meet with unusual tact.

Les mamelles de Tirésias is one of the most charged theatrical works from Apollinaire’s final years. Published in 1918 by Éditions SIC, it emerged from the circle of Pierre Albert-Birot, where literary experiment, typography, music and visual art converged. Its subtitle, ‘drame surréaliste’, gives the book a singular place before Surrealism was codified as a movement by Breton. Serge Férat supplied seven drawings, making the volume both a literary text and an early modernist artist’s book. The music by Germaine Albert-Birot further emphasizes its hybrid nature, poised between stage, image, sound and manifesto. This unnumbered copy, on browned paper, preserves the fragile material character of the original issue. For the bibliophile, it is a tangible witness to the moment when the French avant-garde began to name its own future.

Mes caravanes is a poetic publication from Aragon’s post-war period, issued in 1954 by Seghers. The collection no longer stands at the centre of historical Surrealism, yet it bears the name of one of the major figures who helped shape that adventure. Here Aragon is the poet of engagement, memory and political conviction rather than the young Surrealist provocateur of the 1920s. For The Hidden Page, the appeal lies in the combination of a major avant-garde author with an extremely small deluxe limitation. This copy, number 15 of only 40 on Hollande, belongs to the sole large-paper issue. A post-war poetry booklet thus acquires particular bibliophilic sharpness and collector interest.

L’Herbe rouge is one of Boris Vian’s most singular novels, born of the nervous imagination of post-war Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The first edition appeared in 1950 with Toutain and belongs to the group of Vian publications that often met with limited success during his lifetime before acquiring cult status. The book combines science-fiction-like invention, existential anxiety, absurdist humour and emotional disarray. That mixture makes it especially relevant to The Hidden Page: it is not part of a strict historical avant-garde, but it breathes the pataphysical and experimental spirit of post-war literature. This copy is materially weak, with a reglued spine, pasted-down first leaf and lacking final blank. It nevertheless remains bibliographically and literarily meaningful as the original edition of a central Vian text.

Grains et issues is a key publication in Tristan Tzara’s passage from Dadaist disruption to Surrealist and revolutionary reflection. The book appeared in 1935 with Denoël et Steele, at a moment when poetry, politics and theory were becoming increasingly intertwined within the avant-garde. Tzara, once the voice and organizer of Dada in Zurich and Paris, no longer seeks only the explosion of meaning, but also a dialectic between dream, matter, history and liberation. This original edition is bibliophilically notable as a large-paper copy: one of the copies on vergé d’Arches, signed by the author. Its unopened state preserves the tension between the book as an instrument of reading and the book as an untouched object. For The Hidden Page, it is an exceptionally strong match: a major historical avant-garde author, a key text and a scarce signed deluxe variant.

Les pénitents en maillots roses belongs to Max Jacob’s subtle, agile poetry of the years following his conversion and his partial withdrawal from the Parisian scene. The book was published in 1925 by Aux Éditions du Sagittaire, chez Simon Kra, as no. 17 in the series Les Cahiers nouveaux. In this compact volume, burlesque observation, religious unease and verbal lightness meet in a characteristically Jacobian manner. This copy is enriched with a witty, slightly self-mocking inscription in brown ink. The recipient Fouquet is probably Gaëtan Fouquet (1903–1973), a well-known figure within the broader Parisian modernist circle.. For the bibliophile, its appeal lies in the conjunction of first edition, numbered issue and personal envoi.

Au rendez-vous allemand is one of the emblematic collections of Éluard’s wartime poetry. The book appeared in 1944 from Les Éditions de Minuit, the publishing house that, under the Occupation, became a moral landmark of the French literary Resistance. The volume gathers poems in which love, mourning, revolt and hope appear not as abstractions but as immediate necessities under German rule. The frontispiece, a portrait of the poet after Picasso, gives the book a powerful artistic signature: two voices of modern France, poet and artist, stand here in the same struggle. This is an ordinary, unnumbered copy, but signed by Éluard on the first page. That signature makes the book more than a Resistance document: it becomes a tangible witness to literary presence in a historically charged year. For the collector, it unites the clandestine aura of Minuit, Picasso’s name and Éluard’s own hand.