VOLLARD, Ambroise [illustr. PUY, Jean]

Le Père Ubu à la Guerre

Paris: Ambroise Vollard, Éditeur, 1923



 

Colombier quarto, 38.5 x 30 cm (15-1/4 x 11-7/8 in.) overall, the pages 37.5 x 29 cm (irregular).  8 inserted original etchings mounted on stubs with titled tissue guards, double-page original lithograph and 100 plates and illustrations by Jean Puy.  No. 9 of 30 copies tête d’édition on Japon ancien, of the total limitation of 375.  Half green marbled morocco with elegant green, salmon and grey French swirl marbled covers, spine gilt-tooled in five compartments with four raised bands, gilt-lettered purple morocco labels in second and fourth compartments, covers with triple gilt rolls separating sections, green and brown marbled endpapers, top edges cut, others deckle.  Original publisher’s heavy yellow-tan paper covers bound in.  Collates [2ll. (binder’s blanks)], I l. (publisher’s decorated front cover), [1 l.], 77 ll. = 134 pp. plus half-title, [1 l.], 1. l (publisher’s decorated back cover), [2 ll. (binder’s blanks)].  Minor edge wear and scuffing to covers, else a fine copy in an attractive déco binding.  Johnson 132; Mahé 199; Anth. du Livre, 303; Carteret IV., p. 404

 

Having published his 1901 Almanach of Alfred Jarry’s vulgar petty tyrant Père Ubu, Vollard subsequently bought the rights to the Ubu name from Jarry's heirs.  Vollard enlisted the absurd character to author his own comic indictment of an equally absurd war, using information garnered particularly in many letters from Jean Puy, who sent the illustrations, in his highly incisive genre grotesque, from the front in 1919.  Probably because of wartime shortages, Vollard allowed this book to be first published in 1920 in inferior reduced format on mechanical presses by Georges Crès & Cie, with whom he had a short-lived exclusive distributorship arrangement.  Subsequently Vollard published his own luxe version in 1923 in the line of his celebrated livres-d’artiste, with hand-made paper and hand-pulls of the original etchings.  See generally Rebecca A. Rabinow, Douglas W. Druick, Maryline Assante di Panzillo, Cézanne to Picasso: Ambrose Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006), pp. 200-1, 213-4.

 

Provenance: original owner’s inscription in green ink on front free endleaf recto, “Paul Ancer / 1923.”