PROUST, Marcel. Œuvres complètes. Paris: NRF. 1929–36.
Eighteen vols, 8vo. Contemporary half morocco with red and gilt marbled sides, spines tooled in black with two red morocco lettering-pieces, top-edges gilt, marbled endpapers, green silk place-markers, original wrappers bound in; minimal rubbing to extremities, spotting to edges of textblocks; variable light foxing (especially to first and final leaves), a few marks to upper edge of p. 137 of À l’ombre … III, small loss to upper inner corner of title of Le Côté … I; overall a very good set.
First collected edition of the works of Marcel Proust, the first to establish the canonical division of À la recherche du temps perdu, numbered and printed on Chiffon de Bruges.
Published by Gaston Gallimard’s Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) in collaboration with Proust’s brother Robert, this edition, known as the édition à la gerbe, was the first attempt to gather the author’s works into a uniform collected set and to revise the text following the posthumous publication of Le Temps retrouvé, the final volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, in 1927. It also fixed the volume structure of the Recherche that has since become standard.
Most significantly, the sections originally published as Sodome et Gomorrhe I and II were reorganised into a single volume divided into two parts, while the former third section became simply La Prisonnière. According to the publisher, this arrangement reflected a division that Proust himself had intended for the first edition of the work. The resulting structure became the model adopted by all subsequent editions and reprints of the Recherche.
The first fifteen volumes are devoted to À la recherche du temps perdu, followed by Pastiches et mélanges, Les Plaisirs et les Jours (with a preface by Anatole France), and Chroniques.
Mauriac Dyer, Le cycle de Sodome et Gomorrhe: remarques sur la tomaison d’À la recherche du temps perdu (1992).
SKU: 2124258