Colette remembers her childhood home, in woodcuts
Originally published in 1922, Colette’s sequence of childhood memories appears in a 1931 Ferenczi printing with original woodcuts by Clément Serveau.
The story
In La Maison de Claudine Colette turns back to her own childhood, setting it down as a run of memories and portraits of the people in her family. The book first appeared in 1922. Ferenczi also issued it in its illustrated series, Le Livre Moderne Illustré, “the modern illustrated book”, with original woodcuts by Clément Serveau.
Serveau’s woodcuts sit alongside Colette’s French text, so the house and the family come to the reader in her words and in his pictures together.
The title page of this copy gives its date in Roman numerals, MCMXXXI, which is 1931, so it is not the 1923 illustrated issue that is more often listed. It is bound in brown cloth-backed marbled boards, a binding the record has not dated, and the original wrappers are not visible. The paper is moderately toned. Tucked inside are a folded period advertisement and a printed French clipping, which may not have come with the book.
Details
- Date
- 1931
- Publisher
- Ferenczi et Fils, Paris
- Edition
- Le Livre Moderne Illustré; illustrated printing dated MCMXXXI (1931) on title page; impression not verified
- Binding
- other: Brown cloth-backed marbled boards; later binding not independently dated.
- Condition
- Cloth-backed marbled boards with slight rubbing, moderate interior toning; earlier pencil/ink notes faint; original publisher's wrappers not visible; inserted loose ephemera. Verify pagination and whether original wrappers are bound in.
- Label
- G. E. STECHERT & CO. / ALFRED HAFNER / NEW YORK
