Théâtre mirlitonesque — Ubu sur la butte & Par la taille 

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.

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.

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.

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.