HESSE (Hermann).

Le Jeu des perles de verre. Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1955. 2 volumes in-8, boards in polymer imitating steel, each pierced with thirty-five cells with a mirror background, decoration completed with fifteen pieces of mother-of-pearl and nine small glass beads glued to the central cells, smooth mute spine in silvered squared leather, edge-to-edge lining in the same silvered leather, green water suede endpapers, untrimmed, covers and spine, folders and collective case covered in grey percaline and lined with green water suede (F. Rousseau, 2018). First edition of the first French translation, edited and prefaced by Jacques Martin. One of 100 copies on esparto foam, the only large paper. Hermann Hesse's magnum opus, The Glass Bead Game is also his last great novel, published in 1943 in Zurich, after being refused publication in Nazi Germany. It was largely for this late work that Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. This anticipatory tale set in the early 25th century, after the collapse of Western culture, is presented as the fictionalized biography of Joseph Valet, a high dignitary of a philosophical-pedagogical order living in the utopian province of Castalia. Attractive bindings by Florent Rousseau playing with both glass beads and mirror effects.