La pièce sans A
Very rare first edition of this play written without the letter "A", more than 150 years before La Disparition by Georges Perec.
Octavo, 51 pages, original blue publisher’s wrappers, uncut copy.
215 x 135 mm.
Very rare first edition of this play written without the letter "A",
over 150 years before La Disparition by Georges Perec.
Beautiful copy, untrimmed, preserved in its original wrappers.
Ronden, Joseph-Raoul. La Pièce sans A. Comedy in one act and in prose; preceded by a prologue. By J.-R. R.****, author of Rose et Mérival. Performed in Paris at the Variétés theater, December 18, 1816.
Paris, Chaumerot Pigoreau, 1816.
Very rare first edition of this play written without the letter "A".
Quérard, VIII, 140; Georges Perec, Histoire du lipogramme in Les Lettres nouvelles, June-July 1969, reprinted in Oulipo, La littérature potentielle, Gallimard "Idées", 1973, pp. 77-96.
La Pièce sans A, created in 1816, is a lipogram in "A", that is, composed without "including any words in which the vowel A appears" (Prologue).
This lipogrammatic play by Joseph-Raoul Ronden was recorded by Georges Perec in his Histoire du lipogramme, which accompanied his novel La Disparition published in 1969.
The lipogrammatic tradition goes back, according to Perec, to the Lettres nouvelles et curieuses in which the author uses only four vowels in each letter by Abbé Louis de Court, published in the Variétés ingénieuses (1724).
Thus, Ronden's play is one of the first completed examples of this constraint, and the very first in the 19th century, long before the Essais lipogrammatiques et lettres originales, familières et badines by Le Carpentier (Paris, Dentu, 1858).
"Émile. What do you want from him? Don Roberto. I am the first who must inform Leonore of the double marriage I am planning. However I may try to make her realize its full value, I have no doubt that her first thoughts may present Don Pedro in a light that takes him away from our intentions?"
Beautiful copy, untrimmed, preserved in its original wrappers.
Rare.
