À la recherche du temps perdu
Marcel Proust's masterpiece and one of the major works of world literature.
A very fine copy on large paper in publisher's wrappers.
13 volumes quarto, copy preserved in wrappers, as issued.
217 x 165 mm.
Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time.
Paris, NRF Gallimard 1919-1927.
First edition, with the exception of the first volume Swann’s Way which was initially published by Grasset and is the only one to appear with this publisher, of La Recherche.
In French in the text, 342.
Each of the volumes here is reissued in quarto format on Lafuma-Navarre laid paper and reserved for the Bibliophiles of the Nouvelle Revue Française.
Swann’s Way, 1919, copy no.109.
Within a Budding Grove, 1918, copy no. 104.
The Guermantes Way I, 1920, copy no. CX.
The Guermantes Way II. Sodom and Gomorrah I, 1921, no. CX.
Sodom and Gomorrah II, 1922, 3 volumes; the second volume copy no. XXXVI, the other two unnumbered.
The Prisoner, 1923, 2 volumes, each copy no. C.
The Fugitive, 1925, 2 volumes, each copy no. CI.
Time Regained, 1927, 2 volumes, each copy no. XLII.
“This dizzying retrospection—we accompany its unfolding as we see how, from ‘Pleasures and Days’ to ‘Jean Santeuil’ and to ‘Against Sainte-Beuve’, ‘La Recherche’ is prepared, witnessing the process of expanding a work that was initially supposed to consist of only two or three volumes.
Finally, this alchemy capable of enabling the deep self of the narrator to communicate with the world, we approach its secret when we listen to Proust’s sentence: ‘Memory and oblivion cease to be two antagonistic forces, instead participating in the same dynamics of writing, free enough of itself, shifting enough to extract from the meanders and folds of time the signs most foreign to each other, yet to conjoin them in the infinite profusion of the work.’” (Gilles Quinsat, In French in the Text).
