Une aventure méthodique

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.

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.

*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.

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.