Du côté de chez Swann
Copy with the author's portrait by Armand Coussens mounted at front — 1 print on Japanese paper, numbered and signed (15/120).
Du côté de chez Swann was printed in 1750 copies in 1913, followed shortly by two further printings of 500 copies each, with variants in the text and typesetting: in these later printings, the achevé d’imprimer appears on the verso of a separate leaf, following a table of contents that does not exist in the first printing.
All copies bear an achevé d’imprimer dated 8 November 1913.
A copy of the first issue, without the table of contents, and of the first state: a typographical error was corrected during this first printing, namely a raised space in GRASSET, between the E and the T.
Our copy indeed shows this typographical flaw, generally recognized as the mark of the very first state.
The deluxe-paper copies (5 on Japanese paper and 12 on Hollande) were printed later, with the errors corrected.
It was in 1909 that Marcel Proust began negotiating with publishers for the eventual publication of his great work, and found in Bernard Grasset an interested partner who agreed to publish, at the author’s expense, the first part of the work: Du côté de chez Swann, in which the novelist reveals his mastery of the sentence, placed at the service of depicting emotion and the “intermittences of the heart.” The small world of Combray is revealed here for the first time, opening one of the most remarkable literary cycles ever produced, one that asks only for the reader to slow down and take the time to see clothing, faces, colors, scents, bodies and time itself evoked with total precision, reconstructing the fabric of a world he knows to be slipping, day by day, a little further into imperfection. And yet no one has gone further in portraiture, in flesh, and in memory.
A very fine copy, enriched with a portrait of Marcel Proust drawn and engraved by Armand Coussens, in drypoint, printed on Japanese paper, numbered and signed (15/120). It was around 1920 that this French engraver produced a series of drypoint portraits of writers, including Rimbaud, Daudet, Toulet, Gide, Maurras, France, Valéry and Proust. One of these 120 prints is regularly found in copies from that period.