MODERNISMS

BLACKWELL’S RARE BOOKS
One of 10 presentation copies
88. Tzara (Tristan) Grains et Issues.
Rêve Éxperimental. Paris: Denoel
et Steele, 1935, FIRST EDITION, IX/10
COPIES reserved for the author and
printed on pink paper, page edges
slightly toned, pp. 317, [1], crown
8vo, original brown wrappers over
stiff card with small printed labels
to backstrip and both covers, that
to backstrip a little sunned, the
outer paper a little worn to
backstrip and joint ends, and the hinges straining from the heavy textblock, faint
spotting to top edge, good £950
Inscribed by the author to the half-title: ‘à Jess, avec le souvenir de Tristan Tzara, 1937’.
A series of prose-poems with their foundation in dream, each reflected upon in a
section of notes at the rear.
89. Barnes (Djuna) Nightwood. Faber and Faber,
1936, FIRST EDITION, pp. 239, 8vo, original purple
cloth, backstrip lettered in gilt with a small area
of fading at head and slight lean to spine, slight
knock to top corner of upper board, top edge
purple now slightly faded, endpapers spotted
with contemporary ownership inscription to
flyleaf and a later ownership inscription to front
pastedown concealed by flap, small bookseller
ticket at foot of same, dustjacket with sunned
backstrip panel, frayed around head with some
loss at head of backstrip panel, a little tape repair
to corners of front panel, good £300
A scarce book, the dustjacket carrying Eliot’s
warning that the book ‘has nothing to offer readers
whose temperament attaches them to either an easy
or a frightened optimism’.
90. Gide (André) ‘Il va sans dire...’ [‘Il va de soi....'] [Working manuscript on the
Spanish Civil War.] circa 1936, written in black ink on blue paper with many
corrections and insertions in the same, the smaller leaf providing a passage
marked for insertion (‘v. feuillet’) between the second and third paragraphs of p. 2,
pp. [5, rectos only], various sizes and formats, very good condition £1,000
Gide’s article, published as ‘Il va de soi...’ (the crossed-through title on the final sheet)
in ‘Vendredi’, the organ of the Front populaire on 22nd January 1937, praises the
Marxist volunteers going to fight in Spain and offers a damning assessment of Franco.
Though, broadly speaking, the author’s allegiances are clear, the subtext of the piece
is Gide’s ‘Retour de l' U.R.S.S.’ from 1936, which had offered a critical account of
communism and a repudiation of his previous sympathies. His compromise here takes
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