LEMAÎTRE, Maurice. Sisteme de Notasion pour les Lètries. Paris: Editions Richard-Masse. 1952.
8vo. Cream soft covers lettered in black to front cover with a typographic dust jacket; pp. 67, [30, (unpaginated Lettrist scores)]; toning to jacket spine, textblock detached, toning with some spotting to preliminaries; good.
The rarest early book by Maurice Lemaître.
Sisteme de Notasion pour les Lètries is the rarest early book by Lemaître. It was hastily produced in a small number of copies to be presented at an evening gathering. Some parts of the book were later recycled in his 1955 work, Bilan Lettriste. As a result, very few booklets remain intact today. This copy is inscribed in black and blue ink to the front free endpaper.
This “lesson in Lettrism”, as Lemaître himself entitled it, aimed to upend even spelling, and reproduces for the first time his phonetic, semiotic and linguistic experiments, as well as his very first Lettrist scores, including his first symphony Le Mariaje du Don et de la Volga.
This copy is inscribed to Etiemble (name crossed out) with a rare announcement flyer pasted to the same page. The cover is by Serge de Turville.
SKU: 2123524