Henri MICHAUX

(Lyon), (Marius Audin for) L'Arbalète, 1944.

12mo, publisher’s printed wrappers. (54) pp. With a frontispiece plate reproducing a drawing by the author and large capital letters in ochre by Marius Audin. Complete.

First Edition. One of 230 numbered copies on pur fil Lana paper of a total edition of only 235 copies.

Book design and typography by the great Marius Audin (1872-1951), French autodidact printer, typographer, and historian of printing. Audin began as an assistant clerk at the Commercial Court in Lyon but became the editor of a legal gazette and established his own printing and publishing house. Starting in the 1920s, he became acquainted with Stanley Morison and produced a number of booklets on the history of typography and extensive literature on the history of printing in France.

Henri Michaux (1899-1984), French poet and painter best known for his artistic explorations of foreign lands and the unconscious. An intensely private man, born in Belgium in 1899, he studied mysticism as a young man, travelled throughout South America in the 1920s and throughout Asia in the 1930s, and after that, lived in Paris. He published his first book, a volume of prose poems, in 1927 and wrote more than 20 volumes of poetry and prose. As an artist influenced by Ernst and Klee, he created an art of energised ideograms and meandering calligraphy, figures evolving haphazardly out of weltering chaos or of the chaos asserting itself to wipe out anything recognisable.

Excellent copy.

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