De l’humour noir
This sharp meditation by Breton on black humor appears here as a 1937 Paris pamphlet from GLM, in its first trade edition. Issued with a special wrapper and title page, the text was first printed in the catalogue of the Exposition Internationale de Paris 1937. The copy bears the royal-blue wrapper illustrated by Yves Tanguy. It also includes a reproduction of Breton’s collage assembling the chief «masters of black humor». The typography is remarkably crisp, characteristic of GLM’s workshops. Slim yet pointed, the booklet crystallises a decisive moment in Surrealist theory. A scarce piece with equal literary and bibliophilic appeal.
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Breton, André
Yves Tanguy
De l’humour noir
1937 | Paris | GLM (Guy Lévis-Mano)
A brief, incisive, and graphically elegant Surrealist manifesto. Copies in good condition are distinctly scarce. A choice item for GLM and Breton collections.
This sharp meditation by Breton on black humor appears here as a 1937 Paris pamphlet from GLM, in its first trade edition. Issued with a special wrapper and title page, the text was first printed in the catalogue of the Exposition Internationale de Paris 1937. The copy bears the royal-blue wrapper illustrated by Yves Tanguy. It also includes a reproduction of Breton’s collage assembling the chief «masters of black humor». The typography is remarkably crisp, characteristic of GLM’s workshops. Slim yet pointed, the booklet crystallises a decisive moment in Surrealist theory. A scarce piece with equal literary and bibliophilic appeal.
€500
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Format
In-12 (Duodecimo) approx. 17 × 22 cm
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Copy from the ordinary issue; the numbered copies were limited to 30.
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Product DETAIL
Breton probes the paradoxical allure of humor that fuses cruelty, despair, and lucidity. He defines the «black» domain as a tool for subverting convention and releasing desire. The essay moves between polemic and poetics, adducing examples from literature and modern culture. Black humor is set against moralizing irony, urging a different ethics of reading. In condensed form, the piece serves as a theoretical prelude to Breton’s later work on the subject.
Crevel, René · Tchelitchew, Pavel
L’esprit contre la raison
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.
Ill Book
€280
Artaud, Antonin · Masson, André
Le Pèse-Nerfs suivi des Fragments d’un Journal d’Enfer
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.
Ill Book
€2,100
Montherlant, Henry de · Masereel, Frans
Juin 40
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.
Ill Book
€420
Dorgelès, Roland · Dunoyer de Segonzac
La Boule de gui
This first edition brings together three war episodes omitted from Les Croix de bois: La Boule de gui, Permissionnaires, and Le Prisonnier bénévole, formerly titled L’Ennemi des vieux. Published in 1922, it is also the first illustrated issue of these texts. André Dunoyer de Segonzac accompanies Dorgelès’s front-line prose with 42 reproduced drawings and five original drypoints hors texte, including the frontispiece. His nervous, direct line closely matches the stories’ hard observation and comradeship. This copy, number 401 on tinted Lafuma paper, belongs to the regular yet still limited issue of 519 copies on this stock. Devauchelle’s exceptional artist’s binding translates trenches, crosses, and explosions into a forceful modern design, turning the volume into a distinctive bibliophile object.
