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Publisher Gallimard’s headquarters on the Rue Sébastien Bottin in Paris’s 7th arrondissement. Photo: Henri Manuel © Photo Archives Gallimard |
Lovers of French literature will not want to miss the exhibition “Gallimard, 1911 – 2011: Un Siècle d’Edition” at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France …
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Publisher Gallimard’s headquarters on the Rue Sébastien Bottin in Paris’s 7th arrondissement. Photo: Henri Manuel © Photo Archives Gallimard |
Lovers of French literature will not want to miss the exhibition “Gallimard, 1911 – 2011: Un Siècle d’Edition” at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (François-Mitterrand site), which celebrates the 100th anniversary of the illustrious French publisher Gallimard. The show not only commemorates the different phases of Gallimard’s history – including the dark days of World War II, when certain Gallimard directors collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, and the introduction of such prestigious series as the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade and the Folio paperbacks – but also recreates the various stages of the publishing process (under the headings “writing, reading, editing”).
On display are manuscripts by Proust (whose great work A La Recherche du Temps Perdu was initially rejected by Gallimard), Gide, Malraux,
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Mock-up of the cover for Marcel Proust’s “Du Côté de chez Swann,” 1911, which was initially rejected by Gallimard. © Photo Archives Gallimard |
Camus, Beauvoir and Sartre, among others. Given the illegibility of some of the authors’ handwriting, it would have been helpful to present the published pages next to the manuscript pages.
Perhaps of greatest interest are the comments made by the Gallimard reading committee on submitted works. On one sheet, for example, Jean Paulhan rejects the poet René Char’s Les Loyaux Adversaires, calling his work derivative of Paul Eluard’s poetry and concluding, “Sans intérêt, il me semble” (“Without any interest, it seems to me”).
Some of the correspondence of the authors with Gallimard is on display, including amusing doodles by Cocteau, a letter written in execrable French by William Faulkner and a request by the then-22-year-old Jean-Marie Le Clézio (future Nobel laureate) to consider his first novel.
At the publication stage, some of the personal dedications of books to the Gallimard family are shown, perhaps most amusingly in Hervé Guibert’s dedication of his Le Protocole Compassionnel (1991) to the present director, Antoine Gallimard, calling him “mon éditeur le plus sexy” (“my sexiest editor”).
Given the need to encourage reading, it would have been a nice touch if visitors to the exhibition were offered a free paperback or at least a discount on a Gallimard book, but perhaps that would be too imaginative or generous for Gallimard! A warning to Anglophone visitors to the exhibition: all the material is in French, with no translation.
Bibliothèque Nationale de France-François-Mitterrand: Quai François-Mauriac, 75013 Paris. Métro: Quai de la Gare. RER C: Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand. Open Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-7pm; Sunday, 1pm-7pm. Admission: €7. Through July 3. www.bnf.fr
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