Chevreuse

Robert Ganzo was born in 1898 in Caracas, Venezuela. Around 1910 the Ganzo family emigrated and settled in Brussels, where the young Robert Ganzo published small verse pamphlets in 1917 and wrote plays staged at the Théâtre des Galeries. He moved to Paris around 1920, working successively as a dancer, a bookseller along the quays, and then as a bookshop owner — on rue Guénégaud, rue Mazarine, and, from 1938, rue de Vaugirard near the Odéon. It was there that he met Paul Éluard and his fellow bookseller Lucien Scheler, whom he saw regularly during the Occupation.

A member of the Resistance, Ganzo found a literary audience at the Liberation, confirmed in 1947 with Langage and, the following year, with Cinq poètes assassinés, published by Éditions de Minuit — both a presentation and an anthology of Max Jacob, Robert Desnos, Benjamin Fondane, Georges Chennevière and Saint-Pol-Roux, all murdered by the Nazis. A very fine book. Ganzo cannot be mentioned without recalling his friendships with artists: from Óscar Domínguez to Jacques Villon, from Ossip Zadkine to André Beaudin, each illustrated his poems in his own way.

A fine copy with an intimate provenance of friendship.