«A treasury of the French edition» will be available in independent bookstores on Saturday. The facsimile cared for a book by Paul Eluard, illustrated with engravings on wood, by Serge Rezvani, published only 16 copies in August 1947, and never reprinted since, will be offered to the customers on the occasion of the 21st edition of the festival of the bookstore.
«This book of an artist, drawn, at the time, 16 copies, was reserved for the collectors, and gallery owners. We wanted to get out of the privacy of the bibliophile this category of books in expanding dramatically its dissemination», explains Marie-Rose Guarniéri, founder of the librairie des Abbesses in Paris and the kingpin of this event, involving more than 480 independent bookstores in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and French-speaking Swiss.
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Consisting of 40 pages not linked on a high quality paper and a booklet of 24 pages, the facsimile of She was brought up in a palace , co-published with Gallimard, has been pulled of 28,500 copies. A book will also be offered to students of 480 selected classes throughout the French territory. «Who better than Paul Eluard, a poet of commitment and Resistance during the dark years in France, to embody the struggle of the independent bookstore for the inner freedom and the spirit of resistance?», said Marie-Rose Guarniéri.
The feast of the bookstore intends to showcase what the library provides «irreplaceable to the life of the book and, more particularly, to the creation», recalled the organizers of this event in a press release. Despite a publishing market slump and competition from Amazon called the’inexorable machine of war» by the Union of French bookstores (SLF), the year 2018 has been marked by a sharp increase in the number of creations and times bookstores.
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libraries have also put the key under the door as, at the beginning of the month, the librairie de Provence (51st out of 400 largest libraries of France, according to the annual ranking of Livres Hebdo) in Aix-en-Provence. Recently, the City of Paris has announced a call for projects with 250,000 euros to support the independent bookstores of the capital.