A. O. Barnabooth

In 1908, Valery Larbaud had already published Poèmes par un Riche Amateur, in which the singular figure of Archibald Olson Barnabooth, a cosmopolitan and dilettante South American millionaire, first appeared. Five years later, this fictional hero returns, fully realized, in this hybrid volume mixing diary, meditations and poems, as so many fragments of an existence wandering between Europe, America and the East.

The book was published by the Nouvelle Revue Française, then in the midst of its ascent, and established Larbaud as a major writer of French modernity. Behind the mask of Barnabooth can be read both the author’s ironic self-portrait — a polyglot traveler, a lover of foreign literature — and a discreet manifesto for a globalized literature, open to languages and cultures.

This 1913 edition is regarded as the definitive form of the Barnabooth adventure, whose ironic cosmopolitanism and casual melancholy would influence Gide, Cendrars and many other traveling writers.

A choice copy in a perfect binding by Tchékéroul.