Théâtre mirlitonesque — Ubu sur la butte & Par la taille
€400.00
This set of two Sansot first editions from 1906 puts Alfred Jarry exactly where he belongs: not on the margins, but at the ignition point of literary modernity. *Ubu sur la butte* and *Par la taille* appeared in the mischievously titled series *Théâtre mirlitonesque*—small pamphlets with outsized disruptive force. Jarry’s theatre here is not “playwriting” in the classical sense but an assault on morality, power, and logic: grotesque, absurd, deliberately vulgar, yet rhythmically precise. *Ubu sur la butte* offers a two-act reduction of *Ubu roi*, a key text in the Ubu corpus where farce becomes a political engine. *Par la taille*, a “comic and moral” one-act in prose and verse, distills Jarry’s talent for sabotaging conventional dramaturgy. Both were printed in a limited run of 600 copies, with 400 numbered on tinted wove (vergé teinté); *Par la taille* is explicitly No. 62 here. As proto-avant-garde objects—portable, fragile, polemical—these booklets stand on the threshold of Dada, Surrealism, ’pataphysics, and the later theatre of the absurd.
Quantity
Jarry, Alfred
ILLUSTRATORS
ILLUSTRATORS
ILLUSTRATORS
Théâtre mirlitonesque — Ubu sur la butte & Par la taille
1906 | Paris | E. Sansot & Cie
Two Sansot first editions in *Théâtre mirlitonesque*: Jarry as detonator—pamphlet form, limited print run.
This set of two Sansot first editions from 1906 puts Alfred Jarry exactly where he belongs: not on the margins, but at the ignition point of literary modernity. *Ubu sur la butte* and *Par la taille* appeared in the mischievously titled series *Théâtre mirlitonesque*—small pamphlets with outsized disruptive force. Jarry’s theatre here is not “playwriting” in the classical sense but an assault on morality, power, and logic: grotesque, absurd, deliberately vulgar, yet rhythmically precise. *Ubu sur la butte* offers a two-act reduction of *Ubu roi*, a key text in the Ubu corpus where farce becomes a political engine. *Par la taille*, a “comic and moral” one-act in prose and verse, distills Jarry’s talent for sabotaging conventional dramaturgy. Both were printed in a limited run of 600 copies, with 400 numbered on tinted wove (vergé teinté); *Par la taille* is explicitly No. 62 here. As proto-avant-garde objects—portable, fragile, polemical—these booklets stand on the threshold of Dada, Surrealism, ’pataphysics, and the later theatre of the absurd.
€400
Condition Report:
In-Depth Study
References & Bibliography
Format
In-18 (approx. 17x11 cm)
Edition Particulars
Includes: (1) *Ubu sur la butte*, two-act reduction of *Ubu roi*, first edition, limited to 600; one of 400 on tinted wove. (2) *Par la taille*, a “comic and moral” one-act in prose and verse, first edition, limited to 600; numbered copy on tinted wove, No. 62.
Print Run
600
Copy Number
No. 62 (voor *Par la taille*)
Paper
vergé teinté
Inscription
No inscription
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Edition Particulars:
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Product DETAIL
*Ubu sur la butte* reworks the Ubu material in compressed form: a two-act reduction that speeds up and sharpens Ubu’s grotesque logic of power. Hyperbole, vulgarity, and ritual repetition expose authority as pure clowning. *Par la taille* operates as a theatrical miniature: in both prose and verse, Jarry lets a “comic and moral” one-act derail into paradox, wordplay, and inversion. Together the texts show how he frees the stage from psychology and plausibility. What remains is a mechanism of language and force—laughing and biting at once.
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