JOUVE, Pierre Jean. Heures: Livre de la Nuit. Geneva: Editions du Sablier. 1919.
8vo. Original beige card wrappers, black lettering to front and rear wrapper, edges untrimmed; pp. 131, [3]; light foxing to end papers; staining to bottom of pp. 102-103; otherwise very good.
First limited edition, one of 200 copies printed on vélin anglais, with a woodcut frontispiece by Frans Masereel.
Pierre Jean Jouve, a five-time Nobel Prize nominee in Literature, opens Heures: Le Livre de la Nuit (Hours, Book of the Night) with the haunting lines: “There is no victory / There is only dark defeat” (trans.). The poem is accompanied by an evocative plate by the celebrated graphic artist Frans Masereel.
After undergoing psychoanalysis in 1928, Jouve controversially renounced all of his previous material, turning instead to interpretations of Freud. A fierce anti-fascist campaigner, Jouve was one of the leading literary voices at the forefront of the French resistance.
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