Charles Baudelaire/Dufay - Les fleurs du mal - 1917

Baudelaire, Charles; Dufay, Pierre (appendix and introduction). The Flowers of Evil.

A portrait of Charles Baudelaire in photogravure.

Paris, Librairie des bibliophiles parisiens. 1917. Octavo. 347 pages. Stapled copy under original cover with protective clear paper.

Beautiful edition on wove paper with yellowed pages, creases, and losses at the spine (see photos), as well as a tear without loss on the front endpaper. Nice interior, very white.

Critique edition containing an extensive bibliographic notes on the work by Pierre Dufay and a portrait of Baudelaire in photogravure.

Pierre Dufay was a former librarian of the city of Blois (in 1913). Collaborator at Mercure de France and editor-in-chief of L'intermédiaire des chercheurs et des curieux. Founding member of the Société J.-K. Huysmans (1927). Member of the Société de l'histoire de Paris et de l'Île-de-France (1913-1942), the Société archéologique et historique de l'Orléanais, and the Société des sciences et lettres de Loir-et-Cher.

Charles Baudelaire is considered the Poète maudit in Napoléon III's France and Leopold I's Belgium. He published only two volumes during his lifetime, Les Fleurs du mal and Les Paradis artificiels. Nonetheless, he remains the central figure of the major literary turning point of the 1850s-1860s, immediately admired by Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé.
Heir to the great classical tradition and formalist aesthetics, romantic in the grip of 'spleen' and 'mal du siècle' of an entire generation, he inaugurates poetic modernity: his bet on the absolute and the all-powerfulness of poetry, 'suggestive magic containing both the object and the subject, the external world to the artist and the artist himself,' makes Baudelaire a forerunner of the symbolism of the 1870s, of surrealism of 1920, and of all 20th-century poetry.

Beautiful large paper (vergé) edition of this classic and the first edition with the appendix and the introduction by Pierre Dufay...