Bound After Bonet
JACOB, Max Le cornet à dés. Paris: nrf / Gallimard. [1945.]
8vo. Publisher’s boards printed to a geometric pattern in blue, red, and purple after a design by Paul Bonet; pp. 248, [2 (colophon, blank)]; title printed in red and black; small chip to spine at foot, spine and boards lightly browned, slight wear to corners; a few small marginal chips, uniform light toning; else a very good copy.
No. 1517 of a total limitation of 1950 copies, one of one thousand and twenty copies bound after a vibrant design by the Surrealist bookbinder Paul Bonet and printed on Mars paper, of the first posthumous edition of these Cubist prose poems by Max Jacob (1876–1944), first self-published in 1917.
The present edition is a reprint of the definitive third edition of 1923, which had included for the first time a frontispiece portrait by Jacob’s friend Picasso. No other editions of Le Cornet à des (The Dice Cup) were published between 1923 and the present edition in 1945, the first to be printed in the aftermath of the Jewish-born Jacob’s death at the age of sixty-eight at the Drancy concentration camp. This edition –which reproduces the 1923 dedication to the French dancer Liane de Pougy (Princess Ghika) – is also the first to include Jacob’s ‘petit histoire’ of the work, written for Bonet a year before his death. Bonet, who designed over five hundred bindings for Gallimard between 1941 and 1967, is best known for his magnificent, highly sought-after bindings of the works of the Cubists and Surrealists.
SKU: 2124928