Dear bibliophile friends,

The website of the bookshop gets a makeover.
You can now find us at:

www.librairie-edk.fr

Jean-Pierre Bréchet : Furrows and Compositions

Born in 1954 in a small town of the French region Poitou, Jean-Pierre Bréchet, teacher, has always  been painting. He enlisted in the abstraction in the early 90s, with a first work on forms inspired by nature and trees. Since ten years, the painter works on a series called "Furrows and Compositions." In a book published in 2010, which explains this pictorial process of Bréchet, the writer and sculptorr  Pierre Bergounioux wrote : 

Jean-Pierre Brechet aligns more or less crude, approximately parallel strokes with a painful and awkward care, and it moves us immediately [...] And with just a glance the viewer can be sure these paintings made of an elementary, repetitive, somewhat laborious pattern express accurately, powerfully, the human action by excellence, which is to distinguish.

Currently and till the 29th of February, the bookshop offers an exhibition presenting various paintings of the artist.

Ecritures, 2010 - Acrylique sur toile 146x114 cm / Sillons, 2009 - acrylique sur toile 146x114 cm

maurice Henry : a surrealist air in cartoons

Maurice Henry (1907-1984) had many skills (poet, painter, filmmaker) but the one we are interested in is those of cartoonist. He publishdd more than 25 000 cartoons. One can fell in his satirical work the influence of Surrealism, movement he joined in  1933. There, a short selection :

Currently, the librairie Loliée offers books with Maurice Henry illustrations :

• Maurice Henri.1930-1960. Paris, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1961, in-12 carré, jaquette. Edition originale.
• Vive la fuite. Paris, Pierre Horay collection "cartoons", 1958, in-12, couverture illustrée. Edition originale.
• [Henry (Mautice)] - Gatérat (Pierre). Vade-mecum du petit homme d'état. Paris, Seuil, 1952, in-12, jaquette illustrée. Edition originale ornée d'illustration en couleurs de Maurice Henry.

Sourires Pincés by Jules Renard, the beginning of Poil de Carotte

Sourires Pincés (tight-lipped smiles), published in 1890 by Lemerre, is the first book that allows Jules Renard (1864-1910) to enter the inner circle of writers. The book is a collection of articles first published in the Mercure de France magazine founded in 1889 by Alfred Vallette for which Jules Renard is a major shareholder. The acid prose  of the author is critically acclaimed and open the doors for Jules Renard of  literary circles of his time. He makes friend with Lucien Descaves, Georges Courteline, Alphonse Allais, Edmond Rostand, Tristan Bernard, or Anatole France to whom the copy that we offer for sale is dedicated.

 Sourires Pincés is also ("With all due respect" fourth text of the first part of the collection) the book in which appears for the first time the figure of the young Poil de Carotte. The text concluded with a key phrase used four years later in the novel appeared in 1894: "In his mouth, two fingers and in his nose, only one: Everyone can not be an orphan."

Currently, the librairie Loliée offers :

• RENARD  (Jules). Sourires Pincés. Paris, A. Lemerre, 1890, in-12, binding by Maylander. First edition publisehd at the author's expense. Copy with a dedication from Jules Renard to the author Anatole France.  Ex-libris : Dr Lucien Graux.

Pelléas et Mélisandre : Maeterlinck symbolism seen by Carlos Schwabe

Play written by Maurice Maeterlinck and created at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens in 1893, Pelléas et Mélisandre becomes an opera in 1902 under the conductor's baton of Claude Debussy. This timeless drama on the theme of virginal love and jealousy, became in a short decade the symbolist story by excellence. It is no surprise that Carlos Schwabe illustrated, in 1924 for Piazza, the story of this legendary couple. If his interpretation is more drawn from the opera  than the play, Maeterlinck, himself, considered that these illustrations were the most complete and more homogeneous.

 and for your enjoyment, the opera opening :

Currently, the librairie Loliée offers :

• SCHWABE (Carlos) - MAETERLINCK (Maurice). Pelléas et Mélisandre. Illustrations de Carlos Schwabe. Paris, Piazza, 1924, in-8, full morocco binding by Saulnier, case. Deluxe edition with 30 original illustrations in colors by Carlos Schwabe. Limited to 950 copies. One of the 145 copies on Japan Paper with a suite in black and white of the illustrations.

Poids et Mesures : a fantasy signed Obaldia

Quantitative pain

So many doors to open, close. So many beds to make, to undo. Many stairs to climb, to descend. So many dishes to wash, to dry. So many clothes to whiten, to blacken. So many handshakes to distribute. So many letters to write. So many words to say. So many babies bottles and babies scratches. So many horsies to bed-bye and beddy-byes to ride. So much and so little of something.  So many things and so little about everything. So much many and so little few that there it is enough to discourage the best, enough to pitch a tent in the desert.

But so many, many grains of sand ...

In 1959 is published Poids et Mesures [Weights and Measures],  a fanciful and humorous succession of short texts, written by René de Obaldia and illustrated by the engraver and painter Jean Peschard (1927-2009). The frontispiece of this work of surrealistic lookings, is by Lucien Coutaud (1904-1977) :

 Currently, the librairie Loliée offers :

• OBALDIA (René de). Poids et Mesures. Frontispice de Lucien Coutaud. Illustrations de Jean Peschard. Éditions Les Impénitents, 1959, in-4, en leaves, illustrated publisher's case. Limited to 150 copies, one of the 25 copies on Rives BFK paper with an original and signed engraving  on pearly Japan paper.

Dubliners by James Joyce

Dubliners, which is an excellent introduction to the work of James Joyce, is, by itself, one of the most important books of imaginative literature in English published since 1900.

Thus, Valery Larbaud concluded the preface that opens the original French edition of Dubliners, collection of fifteen short-stories published in 1914 (for the original English edition). James Joyce sets up portraits of people who have in common to live in the Irish capital, where the author is also born. We are far from folklore. As a clinician, James Joyce describes the lives of these characters, deals with various themes (family, alcohol, politics, religion). The most famous short-story is for sure  "The Dead" immortalized in 1987 by John Huston's film. We are in 1904, January 6. As every year, two sisters, Kate and Julia Morkan, and their niece Mary, receive relatives and friends to celebrate Epiphany. Among them is Gabriel Conroy, the nephew of the Morkan sisters, and his wife Gretta. From Gaelic poems reading to songs, dances and between dishes that follow one another, the guests maintain ploite conversations and begin to discuss the loved and dead ones, both famous and unknown.

Currently, the librairie Loliée offers : 

• JOYCE (James). Gens de Dublin. Traduit de l'anglais par Yva Fernandez, Hélène du Pasquier, Jacques-Paul Reynaud. Préface de Valéry Larbaud. Paris, Plon, collection d'auteurs étrangers, 1926, in-12, broché, case. First French edition.

Jacques Prévert, the antifascist

La Crosse en l'air, indictment of the collusion of Church and fascist ideology, is part of the famous collection Paroles (1946). But the original edition of this "feuilleton" is from 1936, published by les Editions Soutes. This was the period of the Popular Front, the Spanish Civil War. Jacques Prévert, since 1932, is part of the Groupe Octobre, a theater company, for which he wrote plays and spoken choirs. If he is not a member of the Communist Party, he joined the revolutionary struggle. La Crosse en l'air, whom title is quote from the Internationale, provides a series of virulent humorous portraits, figures from Paris and Rome, during a the journey of a funny night watchman who goes tell the Pope what he trully thinks.

Below, this famous text told by  Serge Reggiani, who was also a member of the Groupe Octobre.

Currently, the librairie Loliée offers :

• PREVERT (Jacques). La Crosse en l’air. Feuilleton. Paris, Éditions Soutes, 1936, booklet in-12, Rare first edition.