Paul VERLAINE.

Dedications. Paris, Bibliothèque artistique & littéraire, 1890. Small in-12: blue half-maroquin with corners, pinched spine, untrimmed, gilt head, cover and spine preserved (Devauchelle). Unissued first edition: illustrated with a full-length portrait of Verlaine by Cazals, woodcut by Maurice Baud and printed on Japanese paper. Limited edition of 350 copies: one of 250 on ivory laid paper (no. 89). It is thus one of the fifty copies initialled by the author and numbered from 51 to 100: it is under a blue cover. (Galantaris, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, no. 105: "Six sonnets from this collection had already found their way into Amour.") Dédicaces is the bouquet in which each flower, in the form of a sonnet, is offered to friends of the past as well as to young poets: forty-one sonnets dedicated to Anatole France, Mallarmé, Bloy, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Coppée, Germain Nouveau, Huysmans, Moréas, Cazals. Autograph letter signed under the justification: to Raoul Ponchon fraternally P. Verlaine The autograph manuscript signed in violet ink of the poem To Raoul Ponchon, which is printed on pp. 57-58, has been mounted and folded at the top. Verlaine will publish in 1892 in Les Hommes d' aujourd'hui the biography of Raoul Ponchon that he had written in August 1887. An autograph letter signed by Verlaine addressed to the Revue blanche is enclosed: he apologizes for the simultaneous publication of his poem Les Pinsons d'Eugénie in the said journal and in La Plume and promises to "compensate them with an equivalent quantity of unpublished verses". A fine copy. From the library of Louis de Sadeleer, with bookplate.