Francis Carco - Bohème d'artiste [Edition originale, 1/50 sur Hollande] - 1940

Original edition, one of the 50 copies on Hollande (after 16 on Japan), bears the number 48.

Very beautiful, entirely untrimmed copy, adorned with a charming chocolate half-leather binding, with a spine decorated with gold-embossed the author's name, the title, and the date. Gilded top. Covers and spine preserved.

In very good condition despite discreet white marks on the front cover and minor rubbing at the headbands. Interior fresh and clean, tiny pinpricks along the margins of some leaves, without severity. A beautiful copy.

Master of popular literature and pioneer of the noir novel, Francis Carco was born in Nouméa (New Caledonia) on July 3, 1886. Poet, storyteller, critic, playwright, and novelist, his youth was spent amidst the bohemia of the Latin Quarter and Montmartre hill. In 1923, the Académie française awarded him the Grand Prix du roman for The Hunted Man. In 1937, he was elected a member of the Goncourt Academy. He died in Paris in 1958.

Francis Carco is 'the writer of the underworld.' 'Dark streets, the resounding bars with the calls of sirens, departing ships, and fires in the night' haunt his universe (Katherine Mansfield). In the Paris of bad boys and girls of pleasure, he shared the bohemian life of Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Modigliani, or Pierre Mac Orlan.

Carco is a poet of subdued tones, he banishes verbosity, gaudy displays, and false lyricism. Even in his simplest poems, one senses a kind of trembling in the background, a shivering. His color is gray, the color of walls, days, memories. His rural or urban landscapes are soaked with rain. Fleshly joys are brief and fleeting. You see bars, shadows, solitary footsteps, a sad and weary universe. These are street loves without joy, like in the songs of realistic singers, from Damia to Fréhel, but Carco excels at playing sad and tender tunes, even composing to a javanese melody.
Robert Sabatier

Francis Carco
Artist's Bohemia [Original edition, 1/50 on Hollande]
Paris, Albin Michel 1940
in-12 (11.50 x 18.50 cm), 285 pages