Au rendez-vous allemand

This edition, reproducing the text of the first edition published in December 1944, was printed on the typographic presses of the Imprimerie nationale. It comprises the twenty-seven poems that Paul Éluard wrote, for the most part, in hiding:

“I have just experienced the immense joy of making a book. I first made a model by photocopying the verses of Paul Éluard published in 1944 by Éditions de Minuit under the title Au rendez-vous allemand. I laid out the twenty-seven poems, enlarging the typography twice over and cutting up the text. I left large blank spaces where I began to sketch, according to whether the mood of the verses matched my own. There was thus a plan for forty engravings. I first drew them large, then smaller and in reverse, to the size of the model, on plates that I then hollowed out with a dentist’s drill. The sequence of Paul Éluard’s verses consists of 23,000 letters of the alphabet. Only the Imprimerie nationale possessed the quantity of type necessary for a single setting, by hand, in lead. And even had it not had them, it could have cast them, since it possesses steel punches engraved by Claude Garamont in 1530 on a commission from François I. These punches make it possible to strike the copper matrices in which highly specialized workers cast the letters” (“L’Agora et le plomb, Entretien,” L’Humanité, November 19, 1999).