Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre
Two volumes. One of 38 copies on Hollande van Gelder for the first volume, and one of 57 for the second, respectively nos. 27 and 46.
Written between November 1939 and March 1940, during Sartre’s military service in Alsace, these Carnets belong to the private workshop of his philosophical work. In the waiting-time of the “Phoney War”, one sees taking shape several of the questions that would later feed into Being and Nothingness and into the unfinished Cahiers pour une morale, also published posthumously in 1983 by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre.
A remarkable posthumous diptych: not the diary of a writer already fixed in his legend, but the living workshop of a thought in formation, between freedom, history, ethics and situation.
Fine binding in box calf by Renaud Vernier, with his characteristic dotted decoration obtained by delicate epidermal work on the leather; the mosaic title-pieces are framed with coloured box calf fillets.
From the library of the Geneva physician Christos Karagevrekis, who commissioned the binding.