Pour un Malherbe
With *Pour un Malherbe*, Francis Ponge reaches one of the high points of his late work. The book is not merely a study of the seventeenth-century poet Malherbe, but a concentrated meditation on language, form, discipline, and literary authority. Ponge uses the historical figure as an interlocutor through whom he clarifies his own poetics. The result is at once a critical essay, a self-portrait, and an ars poetica. This 1965 first edition belongs among the major books of Ponge’s maturity and holds strong intellectual appeal for the bibliophile. Its generous quarto format gives the text a solemn, almost monumental presence. The later chocolate box-calf binding by Miguet, enriched with geometric balsa elements, further turns this copy into a true bibliophilic object.
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Ponge, Francis
ILLUSTRATORS
ILLUSTRATORS
ILLUSTRATORS
Pour un Malherbe
1965 | Paris | NRF
A major Ponge copy in which literary gravity and refined bibliophily meet with rare harmony.
With *Pour un Malherbe*, Francis Ponge reaches one of the high points of his late work. The book is not merely a study of the seventeenth-century poet Malherbe, but a concentrated meditation on language, form, discipline, and literary authority. Ponge uses the historical figure as an interlocutor through whom he clarifies his own poetics. The result is at once a critical essay, a self-portrait, and an ars poetica. This 1965 first edition belongs among the major books of Ponge’s maturity and holds strong intellectual appeal for the bibliophile. Its generous quarto format gives the text a solemn, almost monumental presence. The later chocolate box-calf binding by Miguet, enriched with geometric balsa elements, further turns this copy into a true bibliophilic object.
€1,700
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Format
In-4 (Quarto) approx. 25 × 32 cm
Edition Particulars
One of 66 deluxe copies on Hollande paper.
Print Run
66
Copy Number
No. 24
Paper
Hollande
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No inscription
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Product DETAIL
In this book, Ponge examines what it means to be a writer under the gaze of a major regulating poet of French classicism. Malherbe appears not simply as a historical subject, but as a measure, a counterpoint, and an ally. Ponge reflects on precision, exactness, rhetorical discipline, and the responsibility of the word. At the same time, the book is deeply personal, because its reflection on Malherbe continually bends back toward Ponge’s own working method. The text moves between criticism, autobiography, and poetic self-questioning. *Pour un Malherbe* thus becomes a key work for understanding Ponge not only as a poet of things, but also as a thinker of writing.
Bataille, Georges
La littérature et le mal
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.
Book
€1,600
Ferry, Jean
L’Afrique des impressions. Petit guide pratique à l’usage du voyageur
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.
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€750
Pissarro, Lucien · Ricketts, Charles
De la typographie et de l’harmonie de la page imprimée. William Morris et son influence sur les arts et métiers
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.
Book
€750
Cocteau, Jean
La Noce massacrée
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.
