Some Los Angeles Apartments

*Arrière-histoire du poème pulvérisé* is a later illustrated edition of a key text in which René Char looks back on the genesis and inner background of *Le Poème pulvérisé*. Published in 1972 by Imprimerie Union, it opens with a colour frontispiece by Nicolas de Staël. The pairing of Char and de Staël is especially charged: two post-war voices, each seeking concentration, clarity, and rupture in his own medium. This copy is one of only six hors commerce copies on Arches and is signed. The autograph presentation inscription to Doctor Marcel Zara, with poetic quotation and October 1972 dating, makes it a deeply personal copy.

Les Dentelles de Montmirail is one of the characteristic small masterpieces born of the collaboration between René Char and PAB. It was published in 1960 between L’Isle-sur-Sorgue and Alès, two places that immediately evoke the geography of Char and that of Pierre André Benoit. The edition joins Char’s brief, aphoristic lyric voice to five natural impressions from Montmirail, so that text and matter quite literally meet. With PAB, poetry often takes on an intimate, almost handmade form, and that quality is especially palpable here. The limited issue on Arches heightens the book’s discreet yet unmistakable bibliophile character. This copy gains further importance from the autograph inscription to Dr Marcel Zara, far more than a routine dedication and almost readable as a small autonomous poem. For collectors, it is an exemplary PAB production in which landscape, trace, inscription, and poem become a single object.

What makes this copy especially memorable is not only its tiny limitation but the way it fixes three friendships at once: that between Char and Braque, that between Char and PAB, and that of all of them with the image that outlives them. The eight original photographs are not an illustrative supplement but the true bearers of presence; they preserve gazes, workspaces, and silences. The fact that PAB and Mariette Lachaud signed this copy gives it an almost confidential status, as though the circle of makers were still present within the book. In such editions, bibliophily becomes more than rarity alone: it becomes a form of shared memory.

L’emploi du temps is a modest yet notably appealing poetry book from the late 1960s. Paul Mari’s text is given particular weight by the presence of Henri Goetz, whose signed original colour engraving moves the volume into the field of the modern artist’s book. Published by Éditions Chambelland in 1969, it appeared in a limited issue on pur fil paper. This copy, number 22 of 50, belongs to the deluxe variant with original print. It is made more distinctive by Paul Mari’s autograph presentation inscription to Susy Solidor, a figure with her own charged place in twentieth-century artistic and social culture. The combination of small limitation, signed print, inscription and avant-garde context makes the book relevant to The Hidden Page, even if Mari is less canonical than his illustrator.