Terre sur terre
*Terre sur terre* stands among Tristan Tzara’s notable postwar poetry books and was issued in 1946 by Trois Collines, a publisher that became an important meeting point for poetry and art in the immediate aftermath of the war. The collaboration with André Masson gives the volume a distinctive visual charge without diminishing the lyrical autonomy of Tzara’s text. Masson’s ten compositions echo the book’s cadence through a nervous, organic language of form closely attuned to Tzara’s imagery. This copy, numbered 1543 of 3000 on vergé crème, is further enriched by a warm inscription from Tzara to René Lacôte. It therefore carries not only bibliophilic value but also a clear literary provenance. For the collector, it is a compact yet eloquent witness to poetry, avant-garde legacy, and personal exchange.
Quantity
Tzara, Tristan
Masson, André
Terre sur terre
1946 | Genève & Paris | Trois Collines
With its first-edition status, Masson illustrations, and inscription to René Lacôte, this copy offers an especially eloquent witness to Tzara’s postwar poetry. It unites aesthetic force and literary intimacy in a rare form.
*Terre sur terre* stands among Tristan Tzara’s notable postwar poetry books and was issued in 1946 by Trois Collines, a publisher that became an important meeting point for poetry and art in the immediate aftermath of the war. The collaboration with André Masson gives the volume a distinctive visual charge without diminishing the lyrical autonomy of Tzara’s text. Masson’s ten compositions echo the book’s cadence through a nervous, organic language of form closely attuned to Tzara’s imagery. This copy, numbered 1543 of 3000 on vergé crème, is further enriched by a warm inscription from Tzara to René Lacôte. It therefore carries not only bibliophilic value but also a clear literary provenance. For the collector, it is a compact yet eloquent witness to poetry, avant-garde legacy, and personal exchange.
€425
Condition Report:
In-Depth Study
References & Bibliography
Format
In-12 (Duodecimo) approx. 17 × 22 cm
Edition Particulars
One of 3000 copies on vergé crème, enriched with an inscription from Tristan Tzara to René Lacôte on the half-title page.
Print Run
3.16
Copy Number
No. 1543
Paper
vergé crème
Inscription
Envoi
1
Edition Particulars:
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Product DETAIL
The volume unfolds as a poetic meditation on earth, matter, life, and reconstruction, written in the shadow of war without collapsing into mere elegy. Tzara binds cosmic and bodily images so that the concrete and the visionary continually flow into one another. The language remains free, associative, and musical, yet it is more concentrated than the explosive gestures of his early Dada years. These poems reveal a writer who has passed through historical upheaval and still seeks a renewed ground for speech. *Terre sur terre* thus reads as a book of recovered breath, where elemental things regain meaning.
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.
Ill Book
€1,150
Char, Rene · Stael, Nicolas de
Arrière-histoire du poème pulvérisé
*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.
Ill Book
€920
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.
