The Satanic Verses
Printed in a unique run of 13 copies (no. VIII), three of which, hors commerce (A, B, C), were signed by Rushdie.
The cover bears a previously unpublished illustration, a variant of the one later used for the dust jackets of the published edition.
On September 26, 1988, Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses was published in London. On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed a fatwa against him over Radio Tehran: “I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the book The Satanic Verses, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. (…) I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they find them. (…) Whoever is killed in this path will be regarded as a martyr.”
This dense and extravagant book of more than 500 pages provoked the affair that would follow: riots, homemade bombs, and above all the murder of the Japanese translator and dozens of deaths during the riots. Rushdie went into hiding under the protection of Scotland Yard. Overnight, demand for the explosive novel led to a shortage of copies. In France, it was Christian Bourgois who honored his commitments as publisher, with the support of the Ministry of Culture and the backing of Actes Sud, Balland, Belfond and Calmann-Lévy: “I published The Satanic Verses because I had signed a contract with an author I did not know. The threats were both very precise and very vague, a daily occurrence, and, I dare say now, in some ways completely surreal to me. I am the most agnostic man in the world; I did not even know what the word fatwa meant… I told myself that if I did not publish The Satanic Verses, I had a good reason: I was endangering the safety and lives of my family and those around me. Except that at that point, I either published The Satanic Verses, or I stopped publishing altogether…”
A pirated edition, supplied by Jean-Edern Hallier for a special issue of L’Idiot international, was released on April 26, 1989, constituting the first French edition.