Le Zéro et l'infini

12mo of 294 pp., table. Bradel binding in mouse-grey cloth, spine and boards in reprographic paper decorated with anthracite grey abstract motifs on a mouse-grey background, anthracite grey morocco title-piece on the spine, endpapers and flyleaves in mouse-grey paper, gilt top edge, uncut copy, covers and spine preserved.

185 x 117 mm.

Koestler, Arthur. Darkness at Noon. Translated from English.Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1945.

Binding by Claude Honnelaître.

First French edition of this classic on totalitarianism.

One of 200 copies on Vélin blanc du Marais, the only large paper printing.

“Today, Mr. Koestler gives us a masterpiece: Darkness at Noon. For him, it is a question of whether the individual, whatever the circumstances, must sacrifice himself to the community. Mr. Koestler, who knows the issue, tells us the story of a political trial. He has a long experience of prisons; he knows what an interrogation, a trial, a sentence, and even an execution are... And he allows us to benefit from his experience. A book that leaves a mark” (Henri Jeanson).

This novel is inspired by the author’s personal experience, who joined the Communist Party in 1931 and remained there for eight years. It is a book of bitterness and disappointment. Darkness at Noon shows us man struggling with the Party. A former leader, Rubashov, is accused of treason and deviationism, and his own words are turned against him. “The Party is never wrong, comrade. You and I can make mistakes. But not the Party. The Party is something greater than you and me and a thousand others like you and me. The Party is the embodiment of the revolutionary idea in History. History knows neither scruples nor hesitation. At each bend of its course, it sheds the mud it carries and the corpses of the drowned.” The Party executes Rubashov because it knows that Rubashov no longer blindly follows the path of History but instead judges and condemns its actions.

The historical scene where the plot of Darkness at Noon unfolds, its bloody backdrop, is the Great Terror that, in the second half of the 1930s, swept the Soviet Union into the dark floods of a gigantic mass crime such as history had never seen before. Four years of systematic purges where the Soviet revolution reached its twilight zenith and the ultimate stage of its criminal logic. A terrifying tragedy that marked the final point of a process in which the 1917 revolution and the building of socialism led to the rise of a totalitarian bureaucracy and absolute power. For Koestler, it is the strangest regime of terror in human history.

A very beautiful copy, pristine, preserved in its intelligent binding by Claude Honnelaître.

The bindings of Claude Honnelaître and the subtle art of this “book dressmaker”: the modernity of her decorative papers, the precision of her cuts, and the ever-reinvented harmony of colours. Claude Honnelaître (1929-2005) developed a unique decorative language in the art of binding using reprographic techniques. The use of humble materials gives her bindings of ink and paper a lightness and sincerity perfectly in tune with the spirit of the texts.