Solal
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour Madame Françoise Verny, en respectueux hommage et en témoignage de sympathie. Albert Cohen,” with bookplate (red ink stamp) on the title page.
Albert Cohen’s first major novel, Solal was published by Gallimard in 1930, the culmination of a long literary apprenticeship that began in 1922, when the Nouvelle Revue française published “Projections ou Après-minuit à Genève,” a text that brought Cohen into the publishing house’s inner circle. Jacques Rivière supported the young writer from the outset, and this early confidence soon led to the venture of La Revue juive, founded in 1925 with Gallimard’s backing. Solal opens the vast novelistic cycle that would be crowned, nearly forty years later, by Belle du Seigneur.
Françoise Verny, a graduate of the École normale supérieure and agrégée in philosophy, joined Grasset in 1964 and became one of the leading French editors of the second half of the twentieth century, before joining Gallimard in 1982 as deputy to Claude Gallimard. A formidable and admired figure, often nicknamed the “Pope of Publishing,” she presided over Parisian literary life for decades.
An excellent provenance.