One of 120 copies on pur fil Vidalon paper (no. 60), printed with the name of the Baroness Vaxelaire.
21 woodcuts by Pierre-Eugène Clairin.
The collection comprises four texts, true prose poems written in 1936 and 1937:
Noces à Tipasa: Tipasa, with its Roman ruins and the sea below, which “celebrates the marriage of man and the world”;
Le vent à Djemila: the ruins of Djemila perched on a rocky spur, still bathed in sun but marked by “the great heavy silence” and the obsessive presence of the wind;
L’été à Alger, dedicated to Jacques Heurgon: the life of Algiers in summer, with its sea and sun;
Le désert, dedicated to Jean Grenier: Camus’s journey through Tuscany.
This first illustrated edition was published thirteen years after the original edition (issued by Charlot in Algiers in 1939), with woodcuts by Pierre-Eugène Clairin. The painter had been introduced to Albert Camus by Marcel Damboise, a fellow resident of the Villa Abd-el-Tif in Algiers, in 1935.
A good copy, in an elegant binding by Tchékéroul.