Traité du style
One of 25 hors commerce copies on green Lafuma-Navarre paper, reserved for the author, this copy no. 17.
Inscribed and signed by Aragon to Paul Éluard: “à Paul El[u]ard, à défaut de stylence, c’est mon genre, bien affectueusement l’auteur, Seelisberg.”
Binding by Paul Bonet, executed by Desmules and gilt by Collet: black morocco with an irregular mosaic design in green, red, blue and yellow box leather, gilt title, suede doublures and endleaves, coloured box-leather fillets, original wrappers and spine preserved, gilt edges on witnesses, chemise and slipcase.
The green-paper issue is among the most desirable of the Surrealist NRF books: only 25 hors commerce copies, reserved for Aragon, after the unique nominative copy on imperial Japan paper. Even the wrapper was adapted, its usual red double border here printed in green.
Written in response to Marcel Arland, who had dismissed Surrealism as a literary “trick,” Traité du style becomes one of Aragon’s fiercest polemical books: an assault on good taste, syntax, literary institutions and the cautious habits of French prose.
The inscription to Éluard is ideal. “À défaut de stylence, c’est mon genre” turns the dedication itself into a practical joke on language, exactly in keeping with Aragon’s declared taste for errors, distortions and deliberate offences against correct French.
Seelisberg refers to the Hôtel Bellevue, where Éluard was staying in the summer of 1928.
Éluard strongly defended the book, calling it “very courageous, very beautiful, indispensable.” Aragon, in return, opened the second part of the volume with a line from Éluard.
An exceptional Éluard copy, on green paper, in an important mosaic binding by Paul Bonet.