À la recherche du temps perdu

Du côté de chez Swann was printed in 1,750 copies in 1913, soon followed by two further printings of 500 copies each, with variants in the text and in the setting: the printer’s colophon appears on the verso of a separate leaf, after a table of contents that does not exist in the original issue. All copies bear a colophon dated 8 November 1913. The deluxe copies (5 on Japanese paper and 12 on Holland paper) were printed later, with the errors corrected. This is a second-issue copy, with the table of contents.

It was in 1909 that Marcel Proust began negotiations with publishers for his forthcoming novel-cycle, finding 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 and its “intermittences du cœur.” The small world of Combray was revealed here for the first time, opening one of the most remarkable literary cycles ever produced, one that invites the reader to slow down, to take time, to see clothing, faces, colors, scents, bodies and time itself evoked with total precision, reconstituting the fabric of a world that Proust knew was slipping, day after day, a little further into imperfection. And yet no one has ever gone so far in the portrayal of flesh and memory.

The Grasset volume is here completed by the entire set of titles of À la recherche du temps perdu, all volumes numbered on vélin pur fil — except for À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, present here in the correct first printing without limitation statement, of which no deluxe copies exist apart from the réimposé copies printed the following year. The set is completed, also on pur fil paper, by Les Plaisirs et les jours and Chroniques, as well as by the first Gallimard printing of Du côté de chez Swann.

A remarkable set in wrappers, in very good condition.

Some spines and volumes faded (for Chroniques and Guermantes I).