Modern Books and Manuscripts

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Today’s volume, an 1860 edition of Baudelaire’s Les paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch, is handsomely appointed in navy morocco and marbled paper boards, with a matching suede-lined slipcase. It bears the bookplates of the French writer Maxime Du [...]

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Modern Books & Manuscripts has recently acquired a collection of works by Egyptian-French poet Edmond Jabès (1912-1991). Born to a Jewish family of Italian nationality in Cairo, Jabès published his first book of poetry, Illusions Sentimentales, at the age of eighteen.  During the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, Jabès published books of poetry along with poems [...]

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Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), novelist, literary theorist, philosopher, and journalist -  though a reclusive figure in the literary world – had a profound impact on twentieth-century thinkers such as George Bataille, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, among others.  A recent acquisition by the Library, a joint purchase by Modern Books and [...]

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Popular French novelist Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) first published his realist novel Sapho: moeurs parisiennes in 1884. Two years later, Henry Vizetelly published this first English translation of the work in London. (Vizetelly would later gain notoriety for his nearly-unexpurgated English translations of Emile Zola’s novels.) In the novel, a young artist falls in love with [...]

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For our inaugural post, may we present: Published in the mid-1820s, Musée des Dames et des Demoiselles includes six small books covered in lavender paper and packed together in a blue and gilt paper gift box. Each book covers a different area of science appropriate for delicate demoiselles: fruit, flowers, minerals, butterflies, insects, and birds. [...]

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