Grains et issues

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.

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 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.

L’Orestie is one of Georges Bataille’s most concentrated and unsettling poetic books. Its title invokes Orestes and the tragic inheritance of guilt, blood and madness, yet Bataille offers no classical retelling. The book is instead a brief, severe cycle in which poetry places itself under pressure and almost turns against its own possibility. Published shortly after the war by Les Éditions des Quatre Vents, it retains the tension of the years in which it was written: hunger, fear, desire, religious emptiness and bodily dread. The edition is austere, but bibliographically precise in its limited printing on tinted nacreous paper. This copy belongs to the 175 copies issued for commerce and bears the very early number 7. Its uncut state heightens the sense of an intact, still-closed object from Bataille’s rare poetic production.