Ubu Roi

A rare first edition of Arriver à se réveiller, written by Henri Michaux in the tremulous post-war years. The text unfolds as an inward journey toward lucidity, where sleep and waking mirror each other. Printed and published by Pierre Bettencourt in his own workshop, the edition’s small run preserves the work’s intimacy. The title-page vignette, a linocut by Bettencourt, sets a spare, rhythmic visual key that amplifies Michaux’s vigilant, vulnerable tone. This copy is handsomely bound in brown morocco with balsa boards by Miguet, a tactile nod to lightness under tension. For bibliophiles, it is an exemplary union of poetry, craft, and experiment. The volume embodies the independence of the post-war small press and Michaux’s radical sensitivity.

*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.

An exceptional oblong in-16 volume bound in a single tome, comprising three editions of Au dépens des mots, including the exceedingly rare tête-de-tête edition on nacré japon.

Au rendez-vous allemand is one of the emblematic collections of Éluard’s wartime poetry. The book appeared in 1944 from Les Éditions de Minuit, the publishing house that, under the Occupation, became a moral landmark of the French literary Resistance. The volume gathers poems in which love, mourning, revolt and hope appear not as abstractions but as immediate necessities under German rule. The frontispiece, a portrait of the poet after Picasso, gives the book a powerful artistic signature: two voices of modern France, poet and artist, stand here in the same struggle. This is an ordinary, unnumbered copy, but signed by Éluard on the first page. That signature makes the book more than a Resistance document: it becomes a tangible witness to literary presence in a historically charged year. For the collector, it unites the clandestine aura of Minuit, Picasso’s name and Éluard’s own hand.