À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs

Name: À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
SKU: 31418
Author: Marcel Proust

Paris, Éditions de la NRF, (November 30) 1918.

1 vol. (120 x 185 mm) of 443 p. and [2] f. Half blue morocco with corners, spine with raised bands, gilt title, top edge gilt, original wrappers and spine preserved (contemporary binding).

First edition. Copy of the first printing, first issue, without edition statement. The deluxe copies were only printed six months later, in the summer of 1919 (128 réimposé copies).

Since 1916, Gaston Gallimard had officially become Marcel Proust’s new publisher. From October 1917, he intended to print the forthcoming volumes of the Recherche du temps perdu, taking the opportunity to buy back from Bernard Grasset the roughly six hundred surviving copies 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 some amendments made necessary by the subsequent development of the work, whose printing was continually delayed by Proust’s incessant corrections. This postponed the publication of volume II of the series, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, which was finally ready in the autumn of 1918. The Semeuse printing house in Étampes produced a first ordinary printing of 500 copies without any edition statement, followed by six further batches of 450 copies each bearing statements from “second” to “seventh edition,” all with the same colophon dated November 28, 1918. In total, 3,242 copies came off the presses, while the publisher announced 70 réimposé copies to be printed separately on pur fil Lafuma de Voiron paper: but these were never printed.

It then took nearly six months before the book went on sale — the time needed to finish the edition of Swann, finally ready in early June. The book could then be put on sale, but still without the announced deluxe copies. The planned 70 copies eventually became the basis for a new format, the famous “in-quarto Tellière”: 128 réimposé copies, covering both volumes, were printed in early summer.

Less than six months later, on December 10, 1919, Marcel Proust was awarded the 17th Prix Goncourt for À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs — the first Prix Goncourt for Gaston Gallimard’s publishing house. In the wake of this success, the volumes were reprinted from December 16, 1919, this time in two volumes, with an “eighth edition” statement for copies of the first issue.

A very fine copy of the first Gallimard Goncourt, here in a contemporary binding, with good provenance: Guy Seligmann was the son of Jean Seligmann and the great-nephew of Jacques Seligmann, both major Parisian antique dealers of the first half of the twentieth century. The copy probably comes from one or the other of their collections.

From the library of Guy Seligmann (bookplate).

#31418

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