MODERN ART - Ars Libri

and, later, persona non grata for his collaboration with the
Vichy government, gets the cover’s most prominent credit
for his essay here, but Brassaï’s 64 photos are the book’s
real meat. Working at night, sometimes in the company of
Raymond Queneau or Henry Miller (who gave the photographer
a cameo role in his ‘Tropic of Cancer’) but often
alone, Brassaï became a master at drawing luminosity from
the darkness. The swaths of wet paving stones featured on
the covers and endpapers of ‘Paris de nuit’ gleam like pale
beacons in the streetlight. Inside, Brassaï explores the city,
beginning with its broad vistas and grand public spaces and
gradually moving into the demimonde he knew so intimately.
The prostitutes, the rag pickers, the showgirls, the homeless—Brassaï
juxtaposed them with pictures of Paris’s
leisure class, with the Eiffel Tower strung with lights, and
the Place de la Concorde ablaze” (Vince Aletti, in Roth).
“Amongst the best produced and [most] influential photobooks
ever. It demonstrates that the urban flâneur was a
crucial figure in 1930s photography, perhaps as important
as the social reformer. The book took a definitive step into
new territories, which would be colonized by the likes of
Weegee, Bill Brandt and others, and not least by Brassaï
himself, when his ‘secret’ night work from Paris would
eventually be widely published” (Parr/Badger). Tiny chips at
edge of cover expertly retouched; an exceptionally fine and
fresh copy of this fragile book.
Paris (Édition Arts et Métiers Graphiques) [1933].
$4,500.00
Roth p. 76f.; Parr/Badger I, p. 134; The Open Book p. 110f.
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BRETON, ANDRÉ
Ode à Charles Fourier. (Collection “L’Age d’Or.”) 41, (7)pp.
Illustrations and typographical ornaments throughout, printed
in black (some after ink drawings in pen or brush). 4to.
� rare books 5
Dec. wraps. All contents loose, as issued. One of 175 numbered
copies on heavy Marais Crèvecoeur, signed in the
justification by André Breton, apart from the normal edition
of 750 unsigned copies on vélin (and deluxe edition of 30);
in all, 1025 copies were printed, “dessiné à New-York par
Frederick J. Kiesler.” One of the most innovative and important
publications of the postwar Paris/New York surrealist
axis. A very fine copy.
Paris (Éditions de la Revue Fontaine), 1947. $2,500.00
Sheringham Aa381; Gershman p. 9; Ades 17.47; Biro/ Passeron
455; Reynolds p. 18
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BROCK, BAZON, et al.
Bloom Zeitung. [Signed] Bazon Brock, Bernhard Jäger,
Thomas Bayerle [Bayrle]. (4)pp. (single sheet, folding),
printed in red and black. Numerous halftone photographs
incorporated in the tabloid design of the recto; verso printed
in black as a poster, with massive letters spelling “BLOOM.”
548 x 750 (folding to 375) mm. (ca. 21 1/2 x 29 1/2 [folding
to 14 3/4) inches. A faux issue of the “Bild-Zeitung,” retitled
“Bloom Zeitung” in honor of Bloomsday—June 16th, the day
commemorated in James Joyce’s “Ulysses”—and with the
word “Bloom” substituted in every headline and every ad.
“Bloom will Kanzler bleiben!,” “Bloom-Angst: Kinder laufen
weg,” “Bloom is noch nicht gebannt.”
Published on Bloomsday 1963 (59 years after Leopold
Bloom’s odyssey in 1904), “Bloom Zeitung” was distributed
throughout Frankfurt by Brock, Bayrle and Jäger, somewhat
on the model of Yves Klein’s “Dimanche” of 1960. Brock,
who cofounded the Deutsche Studenten Partei with Josef
Beuys and Johannes Stüttgen at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf,
was one of the most prominent figures in Germany
in the realm of happenings and performance in the 1960s;
Bayrle and Jäger together ran the Gulliver Press between
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