Les Silences de la mer

This is a library copy, from the Biblioteca circulante Harrods, the most important circulating library in South America, which held more than 15,000 volumes in constant circulation. Of Anglo-Saxon origin, circulating libraries — the first of which was founded in Edinburgh in 1725 — expanded greatly during the nineteenth century with the development of the railways, which made it far easier to transport books in crates. This system of interlibrary exchange, without a fixed storage location, allowed for rapid circulation and wider distribution of texts. France adopted the practice from the 1880s onward, developing in the twentieth century its motorized offshoot, the famous bibliobus, the principal instrument of postwar public reading used by the departmental central lending libraries created in 1945.

From this same period, François Mitterrand also owned the first editions of Au rendez-vous allemand and Grèce ma rose de raison, listed as nos. 222 and 675 of the 2018 Piasa catalogue; Jean Cassou had given him the expanded edition of Trente-trois sonnets composés au secret, with this inscription: “à François Mitterrand, en souvenir de Toulouse résistante et hérétique, et dans l’ardent espoir d’une République républicaine.” The President did not, however, own the rare first edition of Le Silence de la mer, published by Minuit in April.