One of 280 copies on vélin pur fil de Lana (no. 10), in addition to 45 copies on the same paper reserved for the author.
Published by Charlot, Camus’s longstanding publisher, Le Minotaure is the first of the eight essays that would later make up the collection L’Été.
The original manuscript is dated 1939, but publication was delayed for various reasons, and the text did not appear until 1946, in a periodical, thanks to Jean Amrouche, Camus’s Kabyle friend then living in Tunis. Since the end of the war, Amrouche had been running Edmond Charlot’s journal L’Arche. In its February 1946 issue (no. 13), Camus published a first version of his “pamphlet on Oran,” Le Minotaure, with an epigraph from Gide: “Je l’imaginais à la cour du roi Minos, inquiet de savoir quelle sorte d’inavouable monstre peut bien être le Minotaure ; s’il est si affreux que cela, ou s’il n’est pas charmant peut-être.” The definitive book version was ready in 1949, with a few textual corrections and Gide’s epigraph replaced by one from Hölderlin.
This period marked the end of the celebrated Algiers imprint: Edmond Charlot went bankrupt despite the commercial successes of his postwar years, and Le Minotaure is one of the last titles in his catalogue, marking as well the end of Camus’s collaboration with Charlot, who would nonetheless go on to found a new publishing house in Algiers, Rivages.