Proto-Generative Poetry
QUENEAU, Raymond. Cent mille milliards de poèmes. Paris: Gallimard. 1961.
4to. Publisher’s white cloth lettered in red and black to front upper board and spine, publisher’s device embossed to upper board in blind, in acetate jacket (seemingly supplied); ff. [iv] [10 (cut into 19 strips and printed to rectos only, see below)], [1 (blank)], [3]; two light thumb-marks to head of upper board; light dust-soiling to front free endpaper, else near fine; authorial inscription ‘á Maurice Nadeau amicalement Queneau’ in blue ink to half-title.
First edition, no. 2,845 of 250 hors commerce copies numbered 2,751–3,000, of the first consciously Oulipian book, a highly experimental work of combinatorial poetry and a precursor to modern computer-aided generation and hypertext, this copy presented by the author to the French writer, critic, and editor Maurice Nadeau.
An early product of the legendary avant-garde literary movement Oulipo (short for short for ‘Ouvroir de littérature potentielle’, or ‘Workshop for Potential Literature’), which aimed to discover new potentialities of language and to explore the creative possibilities of constraint, Cent mille milliards de poèmes (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems) is one of the most celebrated experiments in combinatorial literature. The work consists of ten sonnets, each line printed on a separate strip of paper, allowing the reader to recombine them at will and generate up to one hundred trillion different poems. Queneau described the book as a ‘machine for making poems’, a finite set of verses capable, in theory, of occupying a reader for ‘nearly two hundred million years’, if they were to read for twenty-four hours a day (trans.). The afterword is by François Le Lionnais, chemical engineer, mathematician, and, with Queneau, co-founder of Oulipo.
Provenance: From the library of Maurice Nadeau (1911–2013). At the behest of editor-in-chief Pascal Pia (also the author of the bibliography of erotica Les livres de l’enfer), Nadeau became a critic for the newspaper Combat, founded clandestinely as the voice of the French Resistance during the Second World War. After the war, the newspaper shed its underground identity, and Nadeau worked alongside Camus, who served as editor-in-chief from August 1944 to 1947, for some seven years, popularising the works of Henry Miller, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Henri Michaux, and René Char, as well as Queneau himself. He also remained one of the most prominent defenders of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s literary importance despite the controversy surrounding the latter’s political views. In 1977 he founded his own publishing house, Les Lettres Nouvelles, later Éditions Maurice Nadeau.
SKU: 2122758