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Foreign Literature

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This department specialises in rare and important works of French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and South American literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Here you can find first editions and signed or presentation copies of authors as diverse as Akhmatova, Balzac, Borges, Camus, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Goldoni, Hugo, Kafka, Leopardi, Lorca, Manzoni, Pirandello, Pushkin, Schiller, Tolstoy, Zola, and many others. Among the important works which have passed through our hands are the original working manuscript of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, now in the Pushkin House in St Petersburg, the only known copy of the first edition of Brecht's first play, Baal (1920) with his working notes, and an extraordinary collection of Pushkin first editions.

 
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  1. PUSHKIN, Aleksandr Sergeevich. DUPONT, H. (translator).

    Oeuvres choisies... traduites pour la première fois en français... Tome...

    St Petersburg, chez Fd. Bellizard et Cie; Paris, Au comptoir des Imprimeurs-unis, 1847.

    First collected edition of Pushkin in French, preceded in French translation only by some individual poems and stories, and a translation of The Queen of Spades in 1843. This is one of the earliest major collections of Pushkin to appear outside Russia.

    £2500

  2. ROBBE-GRILLET, Alain.

    Topologie d’une cité fantôme.

    Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1976.

    First edition: a kind of intellectual detective story in which the reader becomes a collaborator in the solution of a crime as much his own creation as it is the author’s.

    £250

  3. ROBBE-GRILLET, Alain.

    Un Régicide.

    [Paris], Les Éditions de Minuit, [1978].

    First edition, one of 87 copies on Alfa mousse (first paper).

    £300

  4. ROBBE-GRILLET, Alain.

    Souvenirs du Triangle d’Or.

    [Paris], Les Éditions de Minuit, [1978].

    First edition, one of 87 copies on Alfa mousse (first paper).

    £350

  5. ROUVEYRE, André.

    Two typescript drafts of Apollinaire (1952), here titled ‘Stature d’Apollinaire. Gravures de Henri Matisse’,

    c. 1950.

    ROUVEYRE, André, and Henri MATISSE. Apollinaire. Paris, Raisons d’Etre, 1952 [1953].

    £6500

  6. SCARRON, Paul. 

    Le Marquis ridicule, ou la comtesse faite à la haste.  Comedie … Suivant la copie imprimée a Paris. 

    [Leiden, Elzevier], 1656. 

    First Elzevier editions, very rare, of these two plays by Scarron, pirated after the text of the first editions printed in Paris.  A finely bound volume with excellent Elzevierian provenance. 

    £800

  7. UGARTE, Manuel, and Georges FOUCART, translator.

    ‘Contes de la Pampa’: a manuscript translation of Ugarte’s...

    Paris, [c. 1923–5].

    A fine, largely unpublished manuscript, with translations of all fourteen stories from Miguel Ugarte’s Cuentos de la Pampa (1903, here translated from the 1920 edition).

    £1750

  8. ZOLA, Émile.

    La Curée.

    Paris, A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, 1871.

    First edition of the second novel in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, La Curée. The first six volumes of the series were printed on ordinary paper only (no grand papier issue) and are all very rare.

    £2500