Meteor of a madman whose brief, intense flash inspired a significant art movement…
 
The Lay of Maldoror
Comte de Lautréamont[Isidore Lucien Ducasse]
London, 1924
 
First edition in English of Les Chants de Maldoror. One of 100 hand-numbered copies signed by the translator and founder of the notorious Cassanova Society, John Rodker. These special copies comprised the first 100 out of the total edition of 1000.
 
Full vellum. Covers bowed as usual, top half of the front board moderately stained, else Very Good. Printed on handmade paper, uncut and containing three tissue-guarded plates after the French symbolist artist, Odilon Redon.
 
Excitingly, in the rare dust jacket that’s unrepaired and integral - adjectives scarcely applicable to the few surviving ones as they most often look like they’ve endured a tortuous journey through Ducasse’s imagined hellscapes. Slightly nicked and dusty, spine a shade darker and creased, else Very Good.
 
‘Isidore-Lucien Ducasse(1846-1870) was a Uruguayan-born French poet who, under the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, published Les Chants de Maldoror in 1869. Although he died as a relatively unknown writer, his works resurfaced and became a crucial inspiration for the burgeoning surrealist movement in the early twentieth century. It was while reading Les Chants de Maldoror that French surrealist André Breton discovered the singular phrase that became foundational to the surrealist doctrine of objective chance: "as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table."
 
This metaphor captures one of the most important principles of surrealist aesthetic: the enforced juxtaposition of two completely alien realities that challenges an observer's preconditioned perception of reality. German surrealist Max Ernst would also refer to Lautréamont's sewing machine and umbrella to define the structure of the surrealist painting as "a linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them."
 
Lautréamont’s prose poem is comprised of six cantos that recount the epic of the anti-hero Maldoror who seeks to combat the forces of God and humanity. The work is full of sadistic, cynical passages that work in conjunction with ironic references to classical authors such as Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. Surrealists identified themselves with Lautréamont’s use of black humor and celebrated the ways in which he defied convention, ridiculed values and standards, and challenged the construct of absolute reason.’(Rauner Library)