New Addition: Huge lot of Gustave Karr's self-published journal "Les Guêpes" !

The Revenant Archive now contains forty-four volumes of Gustave Karr's rare, self-published avant-garde satirical magazine Les Guêpes (The Wasps), by Alphonse Karr, a milestone series in the history of avant-garde and DIY publishing, and an important potential resource for researchers of the counter-cultural milieu of the time. Prior to this acquisition, the archive had contained the 1887 reprint of the 1839-42 run and a single issue of the original printing.

The first issue opens with a cogent and pretty detailed analysis of the way in which, after the Revolution of 1830, the new moderate-liberal Monarchy exercised effective censorship through economic rather than political means, destroying the artist- and activist-run Small Press community in favour of a few huge corporate press conglomerates. Karr's response to the situation was to start this self-published venture (which lasted ten years) with an intentionally tiny audience whom he called his "unknown friends". This move was extremely rare at the time, when printing technology was expensive and inaccessible, over a century before the 'Mimeograph Revolution', and Karr's rationale in this essay for self-publishing as political and literary dissent, shows him laying the very early groundwork upon which 'zine and micropress publishing would eventually emerge. Karr's discourse in each issue swerves and merges unpredictably, almost as if by stream of consciousness, between political tirades, comedy sketches, gossip and in-jokes about the avant-garde community, literary and social criticism, and sarcastic observations about daily life.

The Revenant Archive now holds copies of the journal's first run for 1839-42 in two separate formats, as well as its full short-lived revival from 1852-55, squelched by the government of Napoleon III, and the 1883 re-issues, with redactions made under censorship of the Third Empire. It also contains a letter from Karr himself, which was found inserted between the pages of the 1853 issue (see "Personal Artifacts" for description). Most of this material was gathered by an earlier archivist, now unknown, and acquired as a collection by the Revenant Archive.