GRACQ (Julien).

Liberté grande. Paris, José Corti, 1946. In-8, semi-rigid box binding in various shades of green, blue and white, decorated with mosaic yellow box inlays, smooth spine titled in black œser, visible nylon thread seams, blue paper lining and endpapers with special motifs, untrimmed, cover and spine, blue cloth slipcase trimmed with light blue suede with magnetic closure (D. Grégoire). First edition. It is decorated with a woodcut frontispiece by André Masson. One of the 23 first copies on Arches paper. Liberté grande is Julien Gracq's only collection of poems; it was the subject of two expanded editions in 1958 and 1969. Some of the texts it contains, composed between 1941 and 1943, had first appeared in magazines close to surrealism, such as Fontaine or Les Quatre Vents. Autograph letter signed by Julien Gracq: to Monsieur Pierre Guastalla, Marseillais, these views of a boreal landscape. Interesting and beautiful "line binding" by Denis Grégoire, from the name - evoking fishing line - that this Belgian bookbinder gave to the technique of "nylon stitching on a semi-rigid cover" that he designed to be entirely reversible. Denis Grégoire presented his work in a book published in 2015 by Esperluète: La Reliure à la ligne, la portée invisible. This binding is reproduced in the article dedicated to the bookbinder in the magazine Arts et métiers du livre (n°327, July-August 2018, p. 29).