QUENEAU, Raymond; François LE LIONNAIS (postface). Cent mille milliards de poèmes. Paris: Gallimard. 1961.
4to. Original white cloth, lettered in red and black to front board and spine, publisher’s device in blind to front; unpaginated; two light stains to top left corner of front cover, in acetate jacket (seemingly supplied); light dust-soiling to front free endpaper, else near fine; authorial inscription ‘á Maurice Nadeau amicalement Queneau’ in blue ink to half-title (see below).
First edition, no. 2,845 of 250 hors-commerce copies numbered 2,751–3,000, inscribed by Raymond Queneau to the French writer, critic, and editor Maurice Nadeau.
An early product of the legendary Oulipo group, Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961) 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 ‘one hundred thousand billion’ 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’ (trans.).
Provenance: From the library of Maurice Nadeau (1911–2013). Editor of Combat under Albert Camus and later of his own publishing house, Nadeau played a pivotal role in promoting writers including Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Henri Michaux, Henry Miller, and 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.
SKU: 2122758