La Boule de gui

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.

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.

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.