La Peste
“The only way to bring people together is still to send them the plague.”
First edition of The Plague by Albert Camus, one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature.
A magnificent and precious copy, one of the first 15 printed on Imperial Japan paper and one of 10 numbered copies preserved in its splendid morocco binding by Semet and Plumelle.
From the library of Charles Hayoit (1901-1984; sale, IV, 30 November 2001, no. 948).
12mo of 337 pp., (1) p.
Greenish-grey morocco sprinkled with small black cubical tools on the covers and spine, raised bands, garnet morocco doublures and red silk endpapers, gilt edges on proof, original covers and spine preserved. In chemise and slipcase. Binding signed by Semet and Plumelle.
183 x 117 mm.
Camus, Albert. The Plague.
Paris, NRF Gallimard, 1947.
First edition of one of the masterpieces of 20th-century literature.
Precious copy from the deluxe edition, one of 15 on imperial Japanese paper and one of 10 numbered copies.
"The longest and most ambitious of his fictions, Albert Camus's novel The Plague is widely regarded as his masterpiece. It is certainly an artistic tour de force: a vividly realistic account of a harrowing imaginary event" (Murray Sachs).
Started in 1938, the novel had a difficult gestation, spanning the entire war and leaving the author anxious a few months before its publication: "I had every difficulty in the world finishing my book about the Plague. It is finished now but I am full of doubts about it (and about myself)." (letter to Jean Grenier, 21 December 1946). Inspired by reading Moby Dick, Camus intended to write his own novel about evil, with each character illustrating a different attitude toward the absurd: "I want to express through the plague the suffocation we have suffered and the atmosphere of threat and exile in which we lived. At the same time, I want to extend this interpretation to the notion of existence in general. The plague will provide the image of those who, in this war, have had the share of reflection, of silence—and that of moral suffering." (Notebooks).
“While the ethical aim of the novel is undeniable, it is never reduced to simplistic preaching and cannot override the evocative power of the novelistic creation. The presence of the natural world, the implementation of essential themes of separation and exile, through the individual or collective pain of the ‘prisoners of the plague,’ the conception and suggestion of a ‘time of the plague’ give this realistic chronicle of an imaginary epidemic the value of a contemporary myth of man” (Laffont-Bompiani).
Magnificent and very precious copy, one of the first 15 on imperial Japanese paper in a superb decorative morocco binding by Semet and Plumelle.
Provenance: Charles Hayoit (1901-1984; bookplate, sale, IV, 30 November 2001, n 948).
