Facile
One of 1,200 numbered copies on vellum (no. 450).
Signed presentation inscription: “à Marcel Adéma, qui a pour la poésie le respect dû à la jeune et à la vieille, Paul Éluard.”
In 1935, Man Ray produced a series of photographs of Nusch, Paul Éluard’s second wife, whom he had met in 1929. It was around these images that Éluard wrote the love poems of Facile, published in a masterful layout by the poet-typographer Guy Lévis Mano. Man Ray closely followed every stage of the book’s production, resulting in one of the finest Surrealist books illustrated with photography.
Pierre-Marcel Adéma, Apollinaire’s first true biographer, had assembled an important library, focused above all on his favorite author but also, more broadly, on early twentieth-century French poetry. In addition to numerous works devoted to the poet, he was responsible for the production and iconographic selection of the Album Pléiade, published in 1971, prepared together with Michel Decaudin, the other leading Apollinaire scholar.