A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur

Since 1916, Gaston Gallimard had officially been Marcel Proust’s new publisher. As early as October 1917, he sought to have the forthcoming volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu printed, taking the opportunity to buy back from Bernard Grasset the roughly six hundred surviving copies of the Grasset stock of Du côté de chez Swann. These copies were reissued under a new NRF cover in the winter of 1917.

A new in-house typesetting was then planned, with a few amendments made necessary by the later development of the work. Printing was repeatedly delayed by Proust’s incessant corrections, which in turn delayed the publication of the second volume of the series, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, finally ready in the autumn of 1918. The Semeuse printing house in Étampes produced a first ordinary printing of 500 copies without an edition statement, followed by six further batches of 450 copies each, bearing statements from “second” to “seventh edition,” all with the same printer’s date of November 28, 1918. In total, 3,242 copies came off the presses. Seventy réimposé copies on Lafuma de Voiron pur fil paper were announced but never printed.

Publication was delayed nearly six months, until the Swann edition was finally ready in early June. Sales could then begin, still without the announced deluxe copies. The planned 70 copies became the basis for a new format, the famous “in-quarto Tellière”: 128 réimposé copies of these two volumes were printed over the summer. These two volumes were meant to be the flagship of this editorial and commercial renewal, and they were in fact the first to benefit from the new-format réimposé printings that would become the norm, comprising 100 “bibliophiles de la NRF” copies and hors commerce copies.

At the same time, the NRF was transformed into the “Librairie Gallimard,” whose statutes were signed on July 26, 1919. This new company combined the review and the publishing house, still headquartered on rue Madame (the rue Sébastien-Bottin premises were not acquired until 1928); a bookshop was also opened on boulevard Raspail (directed from 1921 by Roland Saucier), and a printing house was acquired — the Sainte-Catherine printing house in Bruges, which had printed most of its publications since 1911.

It was a double triumph for the Gallimard house: Swann finally reissued, and its sequel published with great fanfare in the newly opened premises on boulevard Raspail. Less than six months later, on December 10, 1919, Marcel Proust was awarded the seventeenth Prix Goncourt for À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Buoyed by this success, the volumes were reprinted from December 16, 1919, this time in two volumes, with an “eighth edition” statement for the copies of the first issue.

A very fine copy of the first Gallimard title to win the Prix Goncourt, here in a rare contemporary full-morocco binding.