Periodicals & Anthologies

 Anthologies & journals that served as vehicles of collaboration, exchange, and discourse for avant-garde communities.
The archive holds substantial collections of four 19th Century periodicals--see "Annales Romantiques Collection" , "Figaro Collection" , "Les Guêpes Collection" & "Revue Anecdotique Collection" tabs for catalogue and commentary.
A few periodicals are also listed under other headings when their focus is quite specific; see "Historiography," "Music," & "Nervaliens".
 
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Action: Cahiers de philosophie et d'art. Ed. Pierre Reverdy. Year 2, Undated (1921).  Stock: Paris. Softcover Octavo, 64 pp. +16 pp wrappers w/adverts for cubist, dada, expressionist & other avant-garde journals.

 

  

The avant-garde journal Action brought together the recently-established poets associated with literary Cubism and the slightly younger, not-yet established writers of Paris Dada. Edited by the prose-poet Pierre Reverdy, Action contains experimental literature and graphic art, and essays on radical politics, a strong interest in hermeticism and the occult. There are many reviews of avant-garde writing, including criticism by and/or about Tzara, Eluard, Artaud, and many others. The wrappers include adverts for dozens of avant-garde journals around the world, a fascinating snapshot of the experimental publishing network of the time.

 

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l'Almanach de France. Ed. Émile Girardin. (1834). Société pour l'émancipation intellectuelle, Paris. w/Postcard of previous owner.

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Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires (Political and Literary Annals). ed. Adolphe Brisson. Year 21, No. 1044 (June 28, 1903). Paris. Folio, 24 pp.

 

(Left: Magazine cover. Right: Table of Contents for Jan–July, 1903)

 The Political and Literary Annals was a journal dedicated to literary and cultural history, composed of both short articles and republications of archival documents, on a similar model to the older Anecdotal Gazette (see tab for this archive's collection) and its predecessors, but aimed at a broader public and larger circulation. Its format is therefore different from chapbooks of the former journal, which catered to a smaller readership; the Annales is folio size, on cheaper paper. Wider distribution was also paid for via advertising, in the form of an exterior wrap packed with four pages of adverts (themselves an interesting window into mainstream society at the time), while the journal itself was ad-free. It also includes a supplement for "The Woman," which includes articles and images on fashion and etiquette, health, society events, and some embroidery patterns and targeted adverts.

 

(Advertising Wrap)

 

This issue is loosely themed around Victor Hugo, including the "Battle of Hernani." Articles include one on Gautier's 'red waistcoat' worn at Hernani, one on Hugo's visual art along with reproduced drawings, some of his reprinted correspondence, a few articles touching on the recently inaugurated Victor Hugo museum (housed in his home) along with some photographs, sheet music by Saint-Saëns to a Hugo poem. There is also a memoir by George Sand about the Romanticist activist, philosopher and publisher Pierre Leroux, with whom she had collaborated on a Socialist newspaper. There is also a geological essay about volcanic activity on Haiti, on one cooking thermometers, and another on a new photographic technique; "political and literary" affairs was indeed interpreted broadly...

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Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires (Political and Literary Annals). ed. Adolphe Brisson. Book 54, Jan. – June, 1903. Bound volume containing all issues from Year 28, No. 1384, 2 Jan. 1910– Year 28, Noo. 1435, 25 Dec. 1910. Paris. Folio, 644 pp.

 

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Les Annales politiques et Littéraire: Revue Universelle, Illustré, Hebdomadaire. ed. Adolphe Brisson. (Aug 23, 1925). Paris. Paperback Quarto. 26 pp. With Sheet Music Supplement: La Musique des Annales. Paperback Octavo, 8 pp.

and

Les Annales politiques et Littéraire: Revue Universelle, Illustré, Hebdomadaire. ed. Adolphe Brisson. (Oct. 11, 1925). Paris. Paperback Quarto.

 

These two issues of Les Annales politiques et Littéraire's were published more than 20 years after the earliest issue in the archive and 15 after the issues bound together in the omnibus of issues above, and demonstrate both the changes in printing technology and the continuity of the magazine's interests. Its editor, Brisson had pronounced right-wing leanings, and although the magazine itself was ostensibly apolitical in mandate, the fact that it took such a continuous interest in Romanticism throughout its long existence (see the 1903 issue focusing on Hernani, also collected in the Revenant Archive) is evidence of the extent to which the legacy of the movement's mainstream – and to a certain extent its more radical forms as well – had been pacified and co-opted by bourgeois culture by century's end, to the extent where fanfic about Romanticist subculture in the 1830s is included alongside a nationalistic text by Maurice Barrés,whose parodic "trial" had recently been the pretext for the dissolution of the Paris Dada group, and a racist pro-colonial article by the contemptible ethnologist Gustave le Bon (whose personal copy of Gautier's History of Romanticism, used to research his published attacks against the avant-garde, is held in the Revenant Archive; see Historiography).

 

These issues include episodes 4 and 12 of an illustrated serial novel, Les Enfants d'Hernani (The Children of Hernani) by Tancrède Martel, a spirited and light-hearted saga of young Romanticist writers and artists. Essentially Romanticist fanfic avant le lettre, it is packed with references, in-jokes, and trivia regarding the subculture, and the Romantics themselves would no doubt appreciate its local colour. It boasts a huge cast of characters, including historical avant-gardists such as Petrus Borel, Gérard de Nerval, Camille Rogier, Frédéric Lemaitre, Devéria, Hugo, d'Angers, Vabre, etc. etc. etc. In fact Martel, one of the most respected historical novelists of his day, had been close to many of the Parnassian and older Decadent writers such as Théodore de Banville, Jean Richepin, Barbey d'Aurevilly, and with the aging Hugo himself. The novel never seems to have published on its own, which is a shame. There seems no way to recover it short of tracking down and acquiring every issue, but some parts of it can be found in issues online at Gallica HERE.

 

 
Additionally, the August Issue includes a supplement of sheet music containing three short songs, One, La Ronde autour du monde (The Ring Around the World), contains lyrics by the Symbolist Paul Fort (see his manuscript poem and inscribed copy of Hélène en fleur et Charlemagne held in the Revenant Archive). Another has passed through so many translations and adaptations that six musicians and writers share credit – La Veuve joyeuse (The Joyous Widow), by Franz Lehar, with G.-A. de Caillavet, & Robert de Flers, after Meilhac, Victor Léon, & Léo Stein. The last is Premier Amour (First Love) by G. Michiels.

The October Issue, in addition to the episode of the novel, includes the article by Le Bon mentioned above, a short story by Colette, and an article on the theatrical riot at the premier of Wagner's Tannhauser in 1861.

  
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L'Autographe.ed. G. Bourdin. No.1, Saturday Dec. 5, 1863. Softcover Folio, 8 pp.

 
L'Autographe was a large-format journal catering to historians and archivists of 19th century (primarily French cultural) history, and an influence for this archive's associated journal, Rêvenance. It reproduced an eclectic array of handwritten notes, drawings, and other documents. The items in this issue of particular interest for the Revenant Archive include a notes by the avant-garde composer Hector Berlioz (see his Grotesques of Music in the Archive), the revolutionary activist Garibaldi, the Romanticist writers Alfred de Musset, Jules Sandeau (George Sand's estranged husband) and Jules Janin (enemy of frenetic ultra-Romanticism), the moderate Romanticist Léon Gozlan (probable coiner of the term "bousingo" in his satirical attacks on Radical Romanticism), plus a drawing by the liberal cartoonist Cham, a number of whose satires of Anarchism are included in the archive.

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Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Française. (Anthology of the New French Poetry) Ed. Simon Kra. (1928). Kra, Paris.

 

 
Read Text Online
 

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Anthologie de la Nouvelle Prose Française. (Anthology of the New French Prose) Ed. Simon Kra. (1926). Kra, Paris. Inscribed: 1933 / Rosaline Pozarzycki / 508 Walnut – 8958 / "U of M".
 

Starting in 1933 this book belonged to Rosaline Pozarzycki, a student at the University of Michigan, where she also worked in the library on a work-study programme and was engaged with Polish literature as a member of the Polonia Literary Club. Although this book was bought via ebay, it turns out that she grew up in Petersburg Michigan, a few miles from my hometown, and where one of my sisters went to high school. A small world, bound together by bibliophily.

 
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l'Arc. Ed. Stephane Cordier.  Documents 34: Intervention Surréaliste, No. 37. (Undated, 2nd half of 1968). Republication of Intervention Surréaliste with new introduction, 1934. Paris.
 

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Bawdy Ballas and Lusty Lyrics. Ed. J.H.J. 1935. Maxwell Droke: Indianapolis. 

 

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Bief ("Connector") was published by the Paris Surrealist group from 1958–1960. Both its title and subtitle ("Surrealist Junction") underscore its primary role of serving as a conduit between the Paris group and the widely-scattered international Surrealist community, which had grown to include dozens of local groups in North and South America, Africa, and Europe; indeed, by the 1950s it could be argued that Paris was no longer the centre of Surrealist activity, which flourished in the Caribbean and Latin America. As a result, these issues display a constant concern with anti-colonial struggle and contain many contributions from Surrealists working in the French colonies and former colonies, including Joyce Monsour and Robert Benayoun.

 

 The Revenant Archive currently holds four issues, one third of the magazine's run.

Bief: Jonction Surrealiste. ed. Gérard Legrand. No. 4, Feb. 15, 1959. Le Terrain Vague: Paris. Softcover Quarto, 12 pp.

 

Highlights include: a statement by Benjamin Péret about the Church, the Military, and Colonialism; an André Breton essay, 'En Vrac' (In Shambles); three poems by Martiniquan poetess Joyce Mansour; an attack on Abstract Expressionism by Jean Schuster, and a study by Elie-Charles Flamand 'Sur un cryptogramme Nervalien' (On a Nervalian Cryptogram).

 

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Bief: Jonction Surrealiste. ed. Gérard Legrand. No. 5, March 15, 1959. Le Terrain Vague: Paris. Softcover Quarto, 12 pp.

 

 
Highlights include: An essay on the I-Ching by Moroccan Surrealist Robert Benayoun, poems by Egyptian Surrealist Joyce Mansour, several open letters from various Surrealist groups, and an essay by Gérard Legrand:  "Is God a Positivist?"

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Bief: Jonction Surrealiste. ed. Gérard Legrand. No. 8, July 15, 1959. Le Terrain Vague: Paris. Softcover Quarto, 12 pp.

 
Highlights include: A feminist text by Joyce Mansour, a statement supporting Algeria's rebellion against French occupation, a text on Surrealism's relationship to Zen Buddhism by Guy Cabanel, a visual poem-essay by the Croatian Surrealist Radovan Ivsic, an essay on Nabokov's Lolita by Robert Benayoun, an attack on the Cubist poets for selling out, and another against Chagall, and an essay by Gérard Legrand on the intersection of avant-garde linguistics, mysticism, and psychoanalysis,

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Bief: Jonction Surrealiste. ed. Gérard Legrand. No. 12, April 15, 1960. Le Terrain Vague: Paris. Softcover Quarto, 12 pp.

This is the final issue of the journal. Highlights include: an index of all texts published during the journal's run, an essay by Breton on Marxist theory, with a reproduced letter to him from Trotsky, a drawing by Matta, an announcement of an exhibition by Belgian Surrealist Toyen, a contentious essay regarding censorship of an upcoming edition of Artaud and the psychiactric measures applied to him during his incarceration at Rodez, and an international collection of definitions (in French) of Surrealism by Joyce Mansour (Egypt), Robert Benayoun (Morocco/France), Octavio Paz (Mexico), Nora Mitrani (Bulgaria), and the Franco-English Surrealist Jacques Brunius, who had broadcast them in English in a BBC broadcast on the movement that February.

 
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Bifur. ed. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. No. 3, (Sept. 30, 1929). Editions de Carrefour: Paris. Softcover Octavo, 191 pp. No. 749 of Limited Edition of 3,000.

The influential and eclectic avant-garde journal Bifur, one of the main vehicles of avant-garde activity outside the Surrealist hegemony, was edited by the poet & playwright Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, who had been among the most strident of the dadaists and was associated at this time with the Grand Jeu group; in this issue he is represented by a short story, "Mariage d'Élisa" ('Elisa's Marriage'). Other contributions include an article on Paul Hindemith by the composer Darius Milhaud, an array of texts ranging from poetry and stories to articles on the political situation and essays on society that explore similar anthropological territory as Bataille's Collège du Sociologie and their Documents journal – a connection supported by the inclusion of stark, documentary-style photographs of disparate and uncontextualized photographs including industrial machinery, film stills, ethnographic scenes, avant-garde paintings, etc. All this is rounded out by works by Hölderlin, James Joyce and Ernest Hemmingway in translation (Joyce from the English and the latter 'from the American').

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The Brooklynite: Official Organ of the Blue Pencil Club. Vol. 16, No. 3, Oct. 1926. Plainfield, New Jersey. From Collection of Hyman Bradofsky, President of the National Amateur Press Association 1934-37.

 

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The Brooklynite: Official Organ of the Blue Pencil Club. Vol. 23, No. 2, Sept. 1933; 25th Anniversary Number. Hohokus, New Jersey.

 

The Blue Pencil Club was for many decades one of the largest and oldest organisations of self-publishers in America, and a mainstay of the National Amateur Press Association.

 
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Bruno's Weekly. ed. Guido Bruno. Vol. II, No. 19. May 6, 1916. Washington Square, New York City. Stapled Sextodecimo softcover, 18 pp.

Bruno's weekly, whose tagline "Edited by Guido Bruno in his Garret on Washington Square" foreshadowed Fuck You Magazine's "Edited by Ed Sanders in a Secret Location on the Lower East Side", circulated within the same New York countercultural little-magazine scene, fifty years earlier. Its concerns are both literary – with work by Oscar Wilde, Frank Harris (see "Theory & Praxis" and "Ephemera"), Richard Aldington,  and local history articles on the Greenwich Village nieghbourhood, and an article bout the explosion of underground literary magazines across the country. There are articles and ads from Thomas Edison's Little Thimble Theatre, apparently a movie theatre run by the magazine's editor; Edison may well have funded the little pamphlet.

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Cahiers du Sud. Ed. Francis Dumont. Les petits romantiques français. (1949) Cahiers du Sud, Marseilles. Sextodecimo Paperback, 300 pp. w/printed Band for cover. Essays by Tristan Tzara, Robert Desnos, Raymond Queneau, et. al. Texts by Petrus Borel, Aloysius Bertrand, Alphonse Esquiros, Charles Nodier, etc.

The periodical Cahiers de Sud published many fringe and ex-Surrealists. This issue focuses on avant-garde Romanticism, including (among many fascinating essays) the Oulipian and Pataphysician Raymond Queneau (see "Literature") writing on the ultra-obscure frenetic novelist Defontenay, Surrealist Robert Desnos writing on the socialist-occultist Alphonse Esquiros (whom Desnos counts as a member of the Bouzingo), and Dada co-founder Tristan Tzara writing on "The Bousingos as Social Phenomenon", in which he claims that:

"La tradition des Bousingos est restée vivante à... a vu une sorte de couronnement dans Dada et la surreálisme de la premier epoch. [ . . . ] Ils ont contribué à diriger la révolte du poète sur la voie de cette liberté que quelque-uns reconnaissant aujourd'hui, pleinement réalisable, dans les buts de l'avant-garde révolutionaire, sur la terrain de l'action practique et dans la practique de l'action."

           Very roughly translated: 
"The tradition of the Bousingos remained active to... have seen a sort of crowning in Dada and Surrealism in its first epoch [ . . . ] They helped to lead the poet onto the path of that liberty which some recognise today, fully achievable, in the goals of the revolutionary avant-garde, on the terrain of practical action and into the practice of that action."

Another copy of this book exists in the archive, listed under 'Historiography'.

  
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Chansonnier des dames [Ladies' Songbook]. Undated [1830]. Louis Janet: Paris. Softcover 32-mo with hand-written spine text. Inner back page inscribed by early owner in inscrutable pencil. 

   

This anthology of song-lyrics aimed at female readers was published by Janet, who also issued the yearly Annales Romantiques anthologies. With its small size, elegant design, and engravings it doubled as a "keepsake anthology", the forerunner of the modern anthology-format, which Janet pioneered. As was standard at the time, the lyrics were written for popular, public domain tunes, usually indicated at the head of the poem. Several well-known poets and songwriters are represented, including The Princess de Salm, Madame Tastu, Jean-Pierre Béranger (as well as his wife), Castil-Blaze, Madame de Genlis, and de Jouy, as well as some lesser-known writers associated with Romanticism, but the greater number were rarely published, nor is there any trace of romanticist partisanship. The proportion of female writers is quite high for the period – at least 14 female writers are represented, compared to 29 male, and the remarkable fact that over half of the contributors use gender-neutral credits (pseudonyms, last names only, and anonymous texts) probably indicates even more.* 

The preface laments the number of strong submissions received after the deadline, lists the deadline for next year's anthology, and goes on to lay out one of the earliest comprehensive open-submission guidelines I have seen printed in a periodical.

Janet was arguably the most typographically experimental publisher of the period, and this volume is yet another lovely example of romanticist typography and book design, printed by Firmin-Didot. The obligatory  engravings fill out the keepsake-anthology form, with closer relation to the texts than is sometimes the case in Janet's collections. The fact that it is a paperback – technically an unbound copy with hand-written title on the spine – suggests that its original owner was not swimming in cash.

*I have included poets not gendered in the credits but whose gender in the applicable counts, not as neutral.

Click Here for Interior Images & Table of Contents

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Le Charivari (The Hullabaloo). Year 2, No. 134 (Saturday, April 13, 1833) Paris. Paperback Quarto, 4 pp.

The print-maker and political cartoonist Traviès was one of the most devoted adherents to the Evadamist movement, which united avant-Romanticism, occult magic, feminism, and militant socialism. Here he ridicules the archetype of the bourgeoisie, a bureaucrat.

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Le Charivari (The Hullabaloo). Year 2, No. 333 (Wednesday, Oct. 30, 1833) Paris. Paperback Quarto, 4 pp.

 

The satirical magazine Charivari was one of the most vocal opponents of the July Monarchy, repeatedly prosecuted by the government for sedition and libel against the King. It served as the model for the famous British satire magazine Punch, which was subtitled "The London Charivari".

Founded by the political cartoonist Charles Phillipon, the journal attracted many of the leading Romanticist illustrators, caricaturists and draftsmen, including Bouzingo co-founder Célestin Nanteuil, Honoré Daumier, Tony Johannot, and Grandville (many of whose work can be found in elsewhere in the Revenant Archive), and would later become one of the key links between visual Romanticism and Realism. Oddly, the only drawings contained in this issue are a series of tiny naturalistic tableaux of "Various Little Subjects" as the title indicates, signed 'Jules 1831' in tiny lettering. Other features include a satirical comedy sketch about the National Guard, a fake gossip column about the hated government minister Tallyrand, an actual gossip column with bits of news about the Romantic poet Lamartine and career politician Thiers, a column of assorted topical one-liner jokes, a poem entitled "Political Cipher", some barbs thrown in debates with various other newspapers, and a listing of the plays currently showing at each of the city's 19 theatres (among which are included the Diorama and Panorama).

For the Revenant Archive's mandate, the main interest in this issue is a review of the novel Ainsi soit-il: Histoire du coeur (So Be It: Story of the Heart), by Alphonse Brot, co-founder of the Bouzingo. Brot is one of the more obscure writers of this obscure group, and this is one of the few traces of his activity and reputation during its lifespan--four years after he first described himself and his comrades in print as "the avant-garde of Romanticism".

O'Neddy–one of Brot's oldest friends in the Romanticist community–later recalled that his work was considered too conservative by his comrades (he was attempting to merge Classicism and Romanticism, a feat that would not find support in the avant-garde for another decade). The anonymous reviewer here also notes that Brot's plot–a love triangle between an aging Napoleonic general, his son, and her fiancé–is conventional, but praises the novel for the way in which the plot is handled: "But the happy, truly original idea of Mr. Alphonse Brot's novel, is to have summoned all of the interest onto [the General] Luigi's passion. Everywhere else, amorous old lechers are almost constantly ridiculed . . . Things pass more humanely in So Be It. One sensed that the love of a young man, beneath the withered features of the old man, was something tragic rather than clownish..."

At the end of the positive review, the reviewer notes that he has criticized Brot in the past for his "forced situations" and "pretentious style" (both, especially the latter, probably referring to Frenetic / avant-garde elements) and congratulates Brot on reigning the novel in to a more acceptable standard of naturalism and common language, adding that, "we expect still more from Alphonse Brot's talent." We can glimpse here some of the critical pressure exerted upon those in the avant-garde to conform their work to the consolidating expectations of the literary market, visible elsewhere in the review of Gautier's Les Jeunes-France in Revenant Archive's copy of Les Temps, published less than two months before this.
 
Indeed, Brot's short Preface to So Be It (link above) is worth reading if one knows french; it responds to past criticisms of his previous books, relates his  present work to it, and lays out his future plans, eliciting further comment. In his 1829 Chants d'amour (Songs of Love) he floated a passage from a projected play in verse, promising to complete it if the public showed interest; apparently it did not, because it never appeared and in fact Brot stopped writing verse. He did successfully conform to market demands and went on to a successful literary career, his seminal role in founding the avant-garde largely forgotten even before his death; but since then he has disappeared entirely from cultural memory, even in France. Other items in the archive relating to Brot include his novels reproduced in L'Écho des Feuilletons in the "Anthologies" section, his collaborative novel Le Déesse Raison (The Goddess Reason) in "Literature," and an 1880 promotional card for the latter novel, in "Ephemera".

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Le Charivari (The Hullabaloo). Year 2, No. 333 (Wednesday, May 7, 1835) Paris. Paperback Quarto, 4 pp.

This issue of the groundbreaking Romanticist satirical magazine Charivari, in addition to various satires of contemporary Parisian culture, features a weird and whimsical cartoon by the ground-breaking Romanticist cartoonist Granville, who pioneered the humorous anthropomorphic style that has since become the paradigm for both children's cartoons. (Compare to his cover illustration for Alphonse Karr's underground journal The Wasps in this archive.) Here, he portrays a high-society ball in the form of a swarm of dancing insects, each representing an individual well-known to the Parisian dance scene; each individual is captioned.

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Le Charivari (The Hullabaloo). March 7, Year 11, No. 66 (Monday, March 7, 1842) Paris. Paperback Quarto, 4 pp.

Despite its early association with Romanticism and continued publication of Romanticist cartoonists, the satirical journal Charivari had established a position outside the Romanticist-Classicist debate by the 1840s, and was in a position to skewer both sides. By 1842, Classicism was experiencing a resurgence as Romanticism, now infiltrating every aspect of French culture, was beginning to split into several divergent subcultures and cultural tendencies, many adherents to which felt little connection with the movement in its current, mainstream form. While young people in the Romanticist orbit did not remember the movement in its underground, revolutionary stage but simply as the backdrop of further innovation, young Classicists were now able to see themselves as rebels against Romanticist hegemony. 

 

In 1842, a renewed Classicist campaign was launched, ultimately aiming to bring down the impending premier in 1843 of Hugo's new Romanticist play The Burgraves. This issue of Charivari contains a quirky relic of this critical campaign, which resulted in a Classicist riot at the premier, and the end of organised Romanticism in France. It addresses the critical debate swirling around Victor Hugo's Romantic travel guide of The Rhine, between the "Hugophiles" (Romanticists) and "Hugophobes" (Classicists), though generally sympathetic to Hugo. At issue is an argument about a side-comment there in which Hugo suggests the orthography Asculum for a (possibly apocryphal) Roman town briefly mentioned in Horace, OEquotuticum, which Hugo argues cannot be scanned within a French alexandrine line of verse. The Classicist press, it seems, was outraged, asserting that one must retain the Latin at all costs; as more publications joined the fray, this spiraled into a heated battle about poetic scansion. The article pokes fun at both sides in the debate, but unequivocally blames the Classicists for stirring it up, hearkening back to, "the beautiful evening on which the two enemy camps [the Romantics and Classicists] had at it not only with the mouth, but even with hair in the stalls of the Théâtre-Français, over the first performance of Hernani."

 
The featured cartoon in this issue caricatures a group of dandies (or "lions" in Parisian slang) at the opera, peering about the audience with opera-glasses from their private box. It is labelled "The Lions' Pit" (a double-pun, since the cheapest seats, below them, were known as "the pit"). One dandy exclaims, "Naught shall have talent, save us and our friends," to which his companion/s respond in English: "Yes!" Dandy subculture was strongly anglophilic, owing in part to the movement's British roots.

 

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Le Correspondant. Book 182, New Series, Vol. 156, Jan. 10, 1896. Bordeaux. Softcover Quartro, 200 pp.

 

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The Crucible. ed. Clarence Allen. Vol. I, No. 3 (March 15, 1876). Washington, D.C. Soft-cover 32-mo, 8 pp.

 

The first true Zine network – non-commercial pamphlets printed by (often adolescent) amateurs in tiny editions on personal reproduction devices at home to be traded, rather than sold, through a network that spanned both local and postal communities – was known as the Amateur Press movement. (The term came nearly a century later) It began forming during the 1860s in America, and in 1876 the National Amateur Press Association was founded; self-declared non-professionals traded their home-printed pamphlets through massive mailing lists, like the later mail art and zine networks. Clarance Allen founded one of the most influential of these early zines, The Crucible, that very year, and even before the official Association – and nearly a century before the more confrontational zine culture of Riot Grrl and Punk – an extensive community of underground micropublishing was flourishing; The Crucible was one of at least 30 amateur periodicals being published in Washington D.C. at the time. The back cover includes paid adverts for ink and moveable type marketed specifically for micro-publishers working on home machines and small offices, showing just how substantial the subculture had already become.
 

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L'Écho des Feuilletons: Recueil de nouvelles, légendes, anecdotes, épisodes, etc. (Echo of the Serials [or 'Re-Runs']). Ed. Dufour, Mulat & Boulanger; Serials by Alphonse Brot, Auguste Fabre, Alexandre Dumas, fils, Frédéric Soulié, et. al.  (1853) Sole Edition. Paris. 

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F: revue trimestrielle, No. 2-3: Pierre Albert-Birot: Études Dossiers Inédits Bibliographie, n.d. (post-1971). Softcover octavo, 197 pp.

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Fantasy Advertiser. ed. Gus/Norman E. Wilmorth. Vol. 1, No. 6, Jan. 1947. Mimeographed Side-stapled Quarto, 62 pp. From the collection of Hyman Brodofsky, president of the National Amateur Press Association, 1934-37.

 

This mimeographed sci-fi fanzine sheds fascinating light on how the growth of genre/nerd subculture was catalyzed by the Second World War. Building on the many affinity-based friendships between British and American soldiers during the War, this home-made fanzine was a transatlantic collaboration, made in Los Angeles but with a distro address in Leeds, England for European fans. The magazine is dedicated entirely to ads by fans or by the first pioneering genre-specialized book-sellers, advertising their offerings and their needs, in order to facilitate the sharing of magazines and books hard to find on the opposite side of the Atlantic - doing the work that the internet would eventually facilitate fifty years later. Thanks in part to the growth and strengthening of this network, Sci-Fi was just beginning to define itself as a genre and a subculture distinct from the broader "fantasy" catch-all of previous generations, as evidenced by the fact that this was the last issue to be mimeographed, before circulation grew to a size that enabled it to switch from home-printed mimeograph to contracted offset printing. Close perusal of these home-made ads, replete with fan art and nerdy inside-jokes, provides a fun and revealing look at a subculture in the early stages of defining itself.

This copy was owned by the writer and editor Hyman Brodofsky, a very active Amateur Journalist (the predecessor of a Zinester) who edited the amateur journal The Californian and was president of the National Amateur Press Association (N.A.P.A.) from 1934-37, where internal power-struggles prompted H.P. Lovecraft to defend him and compare his prose rhythm favourably to Flaubert and Dunsany.

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Fontaine:  Revue mensuelle de la poésie et des lettres français, Vol. VIII, No. 43, June 1945. Softcover octavo, 140 pp. w/Light marginalia in William Saroyan's article "Quarts, Moitiés, Trois-quarts de Notes Entières" by unidentified earlier reader. 

 

  

The magazine Fontaine seems to held a position in post-WWII French culture analogous in some ways to October today a kind of threshold between truly radical culture and the academic world ready to absorb it. One hand it contains work by and about Breton, Eluard, Reverdy, and Ribemont-Dessaignes for example; yet this is by no means imply as definite a stance as it might have thirty years earlier, and the commentary on them is distanced from their intellectual struggles in a way which marks its distance from a modernist avant-garde journal. Having said this, it should also be noted that most of the contributions in this issue, published within a couple months of the end of the War in Europe, ask the question in hopeful but not optimistic terms, "now, what society will crawl out of these ashes...?"

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Fontaine:  Revue mensuelle de la poésie et des lettres français, Vol. X, No. 58, March 1947. Softcover octavo, 168 pp.

See above for context for Fontaine; this issue is another interesting document of post-War French culture in the process of regeneration (were the editors aware of the collaboration of Heidegger, published here, in the Nazi regime?); for instance D. de Rougement provides a thinly redacted journal of "An Intellectual in Exile" that provides a sometimes scathing picture of the war-time New York avant-garde through the eyes of their refugee European counterparts (it also contains Breton's famous dubbing of Dali as "Avida Dollars"). The many adverts, as always, give a fascinating glimpse as well, revealing among other things an interest in English nonsense poetry with new translations of both Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.

  

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La France Littéraire. Vol. I, Year 3. (Undated, c. 1834?) New York. Hardbound Sextodecimo, 320 pp.

 

 

   

A question has tickled the back of my mind for many a year: who of the French Romantics had Edgar A. Poe read, and where did he read them? We know that he was at least aware of an extremist French literary movement with certain affinities to his own work, for the Battle of Hernani is referred to by name in "The Mask of the Red Death", albeit more than a decade after the event. 

   

This extremely rare journal is one possible answer, albeit purely speculative. It was published in New York during Poe's first Baltimore period, when he was first beginning his literary career, and if this issue is any indication it made some of the most experimental French literature of the time – including the gothic-inflected Frenetic Romanticism which is so uncannily in tune with Poe's work of the following decade – available in real-time to francophone American writers and readers.

Though a number of publications have shared this name, I find no record of this one published in new York; the frontispiece gives no information other than the address, "Bureau de la France Littéraire, No. 6 Thames Street" – not even a date, though both topical references and the literary trends reflected therein establish a date in the early to mid 1830s.

 

It contains contemporary poems and stories reprinted from an array of contemporary literary journals, and while its contents are heterogeneous (even including French translation of English texts!), it evinces a distinctly innovative taste, representing a number of obscure avant-garde writers including Émile Saladin (with a Frenetic-Orientalist crossover poem), Alphonse Brot, Elise Moreau, and Léon Gozlan, along with mainstream Romantics like Lamartine, Hugo, and Alfred de Vigny. (On the other hand, it also contains an implicitly anti-Romanticist article about the degradation of the tradition of artists' dinners since it was got hold of the Romanticist "orgies".)

 

Many of these writers were associated with the Romanticist editor Charles Malo, who edited a journal with this same title in France during this time (1832-39), leaving open the possibility that this American magazine was in some indirect way associated with its Parisian namesake, though I have found no direct evidence to this effect.

   

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La Frontières de la poésie. Chroniques No. 3, 1927. ed. Jacques Maritan. Le Roseau d'or Ouvres et Chroniques, Plon: Paris. Softcover Octavo, 378 pp.

 

This anthology offers a glimpse into a period of great flux within the avant-garde, as Surrealism was rapidly growing in influence and affiliation, but had not yet completed their near-hegemony over the French avant-garde. This volume includes many of the prominent underground writers not yet associated with Surrealism, including a number of ex-Dadas and Cubists. The editor, Maritan, contributed a sizeable text examining the avant-garde in light of Christian theology and mysticism, which is enough alone to explain the absence of anybody associated with Surrealism. Nonetheless it contains work by many avant-garde writers including Jacques Rivière (the famous correspondent with Artaud), Pierre Reverdy, Cocteau, T.S. Eliot (in translation), Max Jacob, Georges Hugnet, Jacques Reynaud, and others.

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Le Globe, Journal de la religion Saint-simonienne (The Globe, Journal of the Saint-Simonian Religion). Year VIII, No. 3. (Mon. Jan. 3, 1832) Bureaux du Globe: Paris. Softcover folio, 4 pp.

 From its founding in 1824, The Globe newspaper was the main voice of Liberal Romanticism, well through the 'Battle of Hernani' and the July Revolution. When the paper dissolved amidst political upheavals in the wake of the Revolution, its socialist editor Pierre Leroux approached the Saint-Simonist socialist collective to buy it, and it became one of Paris' first stridently socialist (not to mention feminist) daily newspapers. As such, its emphasis was not, like many other radical journals, on expounding the movement's theories directly, but rather commenting on current events, government policy, parliamentary politics, and other practical issues from a saint-simonian perspective.  

This issue contains a transcription of the speech given at the Saint-Simonian New Years ceremony by Olinde Rodrigues, the mathematician-activist and Saint-Simonian leader who (among other things) coined the term "avant-garde" in its modern cultural sense; articles on economics and international affairs with saint-simonian commentary on the events, a series of reviews of other French socialist newspapers, a theatre review, and an essay on Saint-Simonian poetics.

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Le Globe, Journal de la religion Saint-simonienne (The Globe, Journal of the Saint-Simonian Religion). Year VIII, No. 6. (Fri. Jan. 6, 1832) Bureaux du Globe: Paris. Softcover folio, 4 pp.

 

From its founding in 1824, The Globe newspaper was the main voice of Liberal Romanticism, well through the 'Battle of Hernani' and the July Revolution. When the paper dissolved amidst political upheavals in the wake of the Revolution, its socialist editor Pierre Leroux approached the Saint-Simonist socialist collective to buy it, and it became one of Paris' first stridently socialist (not to mention feminist) daily newspapers. As such, its emphasis was not, like many other radical journals, on expounding the movement's theories directly, but rather commenting on current events, government policy, parliamentary politics, and other practical issues from a saint-simonian perspective.  

This issue contains articles on government funding of the arts, a transcription of current debates on the state budget in the Chamber of Deputies,  a reprint of Saint-Simon's own comments of 1821 on the subject, current events from Italy, England, and the German states, and a number of various short news items with socialist commentary on the events described. 

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The Golden State: Official Organ of the Golden State Amateur Press Association. April, 1904. Ed. Franklin C. Mortimer. Golden State APA: San Francisco. Softcover Octavo, 4 pp. From Collection of Hyman Bradofsky, President of the National Amateur Press Association 1934-37.

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L’Idea: Rivista Politico-Sociale di Cultura e di Propaganda, Vol. 1, No. 1. Ed. Arturo di Pietro. Oct. 1, 1923). La Rinascenza Publishing Society, New York.

 

l'Idea was a leftist anti-Fascist journal published primarily for the Italian refugee community in America. Its editor, Arturo di Pietro, was one of the first three political leaders to be stripped of his property and Italian citizenship by Mussolini; in America he founded l'Idea and became one of the leaders of the Anti-Fascist Alliance of North America. The nine copies of the journal in the archive were owned by the same unidentified subscriber in Chicago, who labelled the set; it includes two copies of Vol. I, No. 6. 

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L’Idea: Rivista Politico-Sociale di Cultura e di Propaganda, Vol. 1, No. 2. Ed. Arturo di Piettro. Oct. 16, 1923). La Rinascenza Publishing Society, New York. 

  
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L’Idea: Rivista Politico-Sociale di Cultura e di Propaganda, Vol. I, No. 4. Ed. Arturo di Piettro. Nov. 16, 1923). La Rinascenza Publishing Society, New York. 

 
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L’Idea: Rivista Politico-Sociale di Cultura e di Propaganda, Vol. 1, No. 5. Ed. Arturo di Piettro. Dec. 1-15, 1923). La Rinascenza Publishing Society, New York. Missing Covers.

 
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L’Idea: Rivista Politico-Sociale di Cultura e di Propaganda, Vol. 1, No. 6. Ed. Arturo di Piettro. Dec. 16-31, 1923). La Rinascenza Publishing Society, New York.  [Two Copies. one w/ detatched cover]

 
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L’Idea: Rivista Politico-Sociale di Cultura e di Propaganda, Vol. 2, No. 1-2. Ed. Arturo di Piettro. Jan. 1924). La Rinascenza Publishing Society, New York. 

 
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L’Idea: Rivista Politico-Sociale di Cultura e di Propaganda, Vol. 2, No. 3. Ed. Arturo di Piettro. Feb., 1923). La Rinascenza Publishing Society, New York. 

 
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L’Idea: Rivista Politico-Sociale di Cultura e di Propaganda, Vol. 2, No. 4. Ed. Arturo di Piettro. May, 1923). La Rinascenza Publishing Society, New York. 

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The Junior Record, Vol. IV, No. 5. Ed. R.L. Zerbe. Dec. 1883. Cincinnatti, Ohio. Hand-printed Softcover Octavo, 4 pp.

  

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The Ladder, Vol. 14, No. 11-12. Ed. Gene Damon. Aug./Sept. 1970). Reno, Nevada.

 

 

  

 

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 Land, Labour, and Machinery. ed. E.V. Neale. 1879. Co-Operative Printing Society: Manchester. 16-mo. paperback, 22 pp. With markings of Providence, RI Athenaeum.
 

    

This little pamphlet of three essays on the effects of mechanized industry was published by the Central Co-operative Board in Manchester England, one of the first major Co-operative warehouses and a fore-runner of modern co-op stores and businesses. The first is "Men and Machines" by its founder, the Christian Socialist E.V. Neale; the second is "Displacement of Labour by Machinery", a committee paper by the American Social Science Association in Cincinnati, OH; the last is a translation from french of "Labour and Machinery" by Jean-Baptiste André Godin, a Fourierist utopian who had founded a worker-owned cooperative factory-colony in Guise, France.

  

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The Lindfield Reporter; or Philanthropic Magazine, No. 6. ed. William Allen & W. Eade. June 1835. Schools of Industry, Lindfield / Longman & Co.: London. Softcover Sextodecimo, 15 pp (paginated 89–104).

This little pamphlet was published by the intentional community at Lindfield, England. However, it was drew on and was directed to the international network of radical activism spread across Britain, North America, and Europe, and deals with a gamut of the radical causes of the time: the abolition of slavery, universal education (the cover article is about a school for African-American children), temperance, working-class libraries, the abolition of the death penalty, as well as reports on new scientific agricultural methods.

The Lindfield utopian colony was a rural socialist experiment similar to those of Robert Owen, and a precursor of the Arts & Crafts movement of Morris. The community apparently had substantial Quaker ties, and this Quaker-associated magazine had grown out of the earlier Philanthropic Magazine. The journal ran from Jan. 1835–Dec. 1842.

There is only one set of the journal publicly available in North America.

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Le Livre de beauté: Souvenirs historique (The Book of Beauty: Historical Memories). ed. Louis Janet? (1834) Sole Edition? Louis Janet: Paris. 239 pp.

This interesting volume indicates how closely related historiography and poetics were considered among the early avant-garde, and reveals the increasing strain between mainstream and Frenetic Romanticism. In French Romanticism, the revolution in historiography and that in creative culture were considered part of the same continuum, and the founders of modern French historiography–Michelet, Méry, Lacroix, Maquet, etc.–incorporated both academic history and historical fiction into their larger historiographic projects (sometimes to the despair of later historians). We see here that this general tendency was also reflected within the extremist fringes of the broader movement.

Published (and likely edited) by Louis Janet, whose ultra-Romanticist press published the comprehensive yearly avant-garde anthology Les Annales Romantiques, this anthology presents a selection of 14 texts about historical women, most written by people known primarily as radical Romanticist poets and playwrights, including four members of the Jeunes-France/Bouzingo. The contributors were young, most ranging from their mid-20s to mid-40s, and included the most radical exponents of Frenetic Romanticism, Petrus Borel and Charles Lassailly, and ultra-Romanticists such as Aimable Tastu (the only female contributor), Cordellier Delanoue, Gustave Drouineau, Henri Martin, and Jean-Pierre Lesguillon. Their chosen subjects diverge from mainstream selections in such collections, which typically focused on women known for their moral correctness, social compassion, and self-sacrifice–traits traditionally associated with 'the weaker sex'. Instead, here we find women notable for their political influence, in some cases exerted as strong monarchs, in other cases as royal mistresses. Many of the texts are hybrid constructions, which shift between traditional scholarly reportage and historical fiction, punctuated by contemporary commentary.
 
It seems that the book once contained portraits of each woman, by artists who were equally associated with Frenetic and Avant-Garde Romanticism, including Jeunes-France members Louis Boulanger and both of the Devéria brothers.

This copy of the book lacks the illustrations (there is no obvious evidence of removal, leaving open the possibility that it was a reduced, cheaper edition, possible bound from overstock when the tipped-in engravings ran out). Nonetheless, according to worldcat there are only two surviving copies of the book held in public libraries, both in Europe, possibly making this the only copy of the book available in the Western hemisphere.
  

The anthology begins with a surprisingly ambivalent preface by Charles Nodier, and reflects the awkward place in which he found himself in 1834, when the divergence of mainstream Romanticism from the nascent avant-garde was becoming definitive. As the organiser of the Cénacle group, he had overseen the cultural coup-d'état that was swiftly making Romanticism the dominant force in nearly every domain of contemporary culture. But through his experimental, sometimes hallucinatory gothic-horror novels he was also the half-intentional father of the dark, violent, gothic substream known as Frenetic Romanticism, around which had built up the even-more radical community beginning to call itself the avant-garde, which was proving a political and aesthetic embarrassment as the movement's leaders settled into relative respectability. After a few predictable pages of the usual commonplaces regarding the virtues of Love (cf. "Women are the masterpieces of Divinity", Nodier ends his Preface by stating his disappointment at the low moral character of many of the women chosen for the anthology, and exhorting his readers to focus on the uplifting contributions such as the one on Queen Elizabeth. One feels that Nodier is fulfilling a contractual obligation, fearful of endorsing an anthology destined for critical attack from the respectable mainstream press.

In addition to Janet assembling this collection and publishing dozens of female writers in his anthologies, journals and books, his editor for the Annales Romantiques, Charles Malo, had also published his own book of feminist biographies several years earlier (see Historiography tab). Closely associated with the Frenetic and other extremist currents, Janet's fortunes seem to have been tied to it, and he appears to have ceased publishing by the time that it had subsided at the end of the 1830s and the energies of the avant-garde diverted away from Romanticism.
  
This copy was owned by the Institution Hortus (Here is a prospectus of the school the year of Huysmans' graduation), and was probably in the library while it was attended by the future Decadent novelist J.-K. Huysmans, who attended from the age of eight to eighteen, and would himself later contribute famously to the avant-garde intertwining of history, fiction, and social theory.
 

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Le Livre des Vingt et un (The Book of Hundred and One), ed. Philibert Audebrand. 1st Ed. (1889) Calmann Lévy: Paris. Clothbound 16-mo. 434 pp. Authors Copy: Bookplate of Ludavic Halévy. Includes Letter from Anaïs Ségalas to Halévy (see "Personal Artifacts").

This collection of realist, bohemian, and romanticist texts describing various aspects of Parisian everyday life was compiled by Philibert Audebrand, a leftist historian, novelist and satirist. Both its title and mandate (though oddly, not its introduction) point directly to its inspiration from the massive romanticist anthology series of the same name from 1831 (a first-edition set of which also resides in the Revenant Archive) and its subsequent expansions. Two of its oldest contributors had appeared in the original anthology series in their youth, two had fathers who had appeared in it, and another, Jules Claretie, was one of the first historians of the avant-garde.

This copy belonged to the playwright and librettist Ludavic Halévy, a frequent collaborator with Offenbach, Bizet, and other composers, best-known today for the libretti for Carmen and La Vie Parisien, and who had contributed a piece to the collection. He came from a family deeply immersed in the avant-garde: his father Léon Halévy had been one of the leaders of the Saint-Simonian socialist movement and the personal secretary of its founder; after leaving the movement over the religious direction it was taking, he had become involved in the emerging avant-garde of Romanticism, befriending the Jeune-France group and publishing in the original Vingt et une anthology. Meanwhile Ludavic's uncle Fromenthal was a prominent composer, having started his career as the Saint-Simonians in-house composer, and is still remembered today for his play The Jew (the family was Jewish, though Léon had converted to Christianity when he married, and Ludavic followed him).

Kept in the book is a letter, apparently to Halévy, from the socialist romanticist writer Anaïs Ségalas, who also has a poem included in the collection; see "Personal Artifacts".

 
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Isaac Bickerstaff [Richard Steele, Joseph Addison & Jonathan Swift], The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., Revised and Corrected by the Author.  1728. E. & R. Nutt, J. Knapton, J. & B. Sprint, D. Midwinter, J. Tonson, R. Gosling, W. & J. Innys, J. Osborn & T. Longman, R. Robinson, and B. Motte: London. Full Leather Sextodecimo, 352 pp. (Bound Collection of The Tatler, Vol. III, No. 115–189, Tues. Jan. 3, 1709–Sat. June 24, 1710.) Inscribed in Pencil in 18th/ early19th Century hand: Mr. Thos. Kil?????? / Ho??????? / Y????? & six illegible lines plus a title on following recto page. Some light dog-earring by previous reader/s.

 

The most vibrant intellectual life of Eighteenth-Century Britain was played out less in the academies than in the dozens of small periodical journals and occasional pamphlets that established the forms that were later taken up by micropress and zine publishers. It was supported by the readership and participation of the patrons of a dense network of coffeehouses that served as public forums of the emerging political, cultural, and scientific ideas of their day.

The satirical little magazine The Tatler, edited and primarily written by Richard Steele, offered a weekly run-down of the London coffeehouse scene, via an eclectic mix of poetic parodies, gossip columns, transcriptions of debates and orations, reports of current topics of scientific, cultural, or political interest, and many hybrid forms. Articles were written from the perspective of the fictional editor "Isaac Bickerstaff" (the distant ancestor of later satirical "journalists" including Punch (of the British magazine) and Alfred E. Neuman (Mad Magazine). Each week, the magazine was written at a different Coffeehouse, whose name was noted on the masthead; it was rumoured that the Tatler's secret correspondents included Jonathan Swift and Joseph Addison. Its combination of social chronicle, intellectual stimulation, and gossip provided a framework later taken up by other small-run journals such as Gustave Karr's Les Guêpes (collected in this archive), Le Chat Noir (also collected here), Maintenant, Littérature, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, and eventually Zine culture.

 

The importance of The Tatler was quickly recognised, and edited collections reprinted. This is an early reprint, produced in 1728. The magazine's low-budget, small-press roots are reflected by the consortium of eleven publishers or patrons contributing to print this volume. This copy was well-used by its first owner/s, but unfortunately the very light, fading pencil and indecipherable (to me) hand of the inscriptions make it difficult to learn more. The fly-leaf contains an inscription of several lines, topped by what seems to be a title, but I am unable to guess at more than one or two words. (I welcome readings or hypotheses concerning the inscriptions shown.) 

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Mercure de France. Ed. Jean-François de la Harpe. No. 39, Saturday, 23 Sept. 1780. Stab-stitched Softcover 16-mo., 46 pp.

 

  

The Mercure de France edited by the outspoken critic and commentator La Harpe, was one of the most influential newspapers of the Revolutionary period (not to be confused with the later Symbolist journal, a copy of which also resides in this archive). 

 

   

This issue contains the account of a legal dispute involving the Chevalier d'Eon, a respected transsexual diplomat and spy who had first made her name as a man, before transitioning. Though the transition had initially been explained as a habit picked up in disguise as a spy, and has since been attributed to a rather unlikely ruse after being caught in flagrente delicto with Marie Antoinette, the fact remains that the Chevalier lived, identified, and dressed as a female for the last several years of her life. The remarkable thing about this article is that it treats her with a respect that would be unusual even today – her pronouns are respected throughout the article, recognizing her status as "chevalier" (open only to men) while consistently referring to her as "Madamoiselle d'Eon" and yet never even mentioning her non-binary gender.

  

Other interesting items include an article on art restoration, bemoaning the effects of chemical treatments and proposing the use of specially-prepared glass to intervene in light degredation; and a long report on movements of the French Army in America, campaigning with Washington and against the British blockade.

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Mercure de France. Ed. Jean-François de la Harpe. No. 52, Saturday, 23 Dec. 1780. Stab-stitched Softcover 16-mo., 46 pp.

  

 

This issue of the Mercure de France, from only two months (exactly!) after the other issue in the archive [see above], also deals with the Chevalier d'Eon in an unrelated article that further demonstrates her acceptance among the French ruling class under the Revolution, as during the Monarchy before it: it deals with the naming of a ship after her. 

  

It also contains a large fold-out chart depicting the results of an experiment in gauging the depth of a recently discovered subterranean river by means of sound as stones were dropped down into it.

 
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 Le Mercure de France, No. 357. Ed. Alfred Vallette. (May 1912). Paris.

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 Le Nouveau Commerce, No. 38. Ed. André Dalmas. (Autumn 1977). Paris. 

   

Named after the interwar avant-garde magazine Commerce, edited by Valéry, Fargue, & Larbaud (all of whom appeared in the new incarnation), this journal prided itself in seeking out obscure and forgotten writers. It was a major venue for the work of a broad spectrum of exploratory writing, and for critical theory, often featuring articles by Blanchot and Levinas and issues guest-edited by Callois and Klossowkski of the College of Sociology and Acéphale groups. This issue includes, among other things, a fragment from a lost late novel by the bouzingo Petrus Borel and a sequence of translated poems (German to French) by Paul Celan.

  

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Némésis: Satire hebdomadaire. Ed. Auguste Barthélemy. (1845). Perrotin: Paris. Hardbound Quarter-leather octavo, 456 pp. Reprint of original periodical run, March 1831 –April 1832. Title-page embossed: “E. Saynes / Proprietaire / à Aigueperse / (Puy-de-dôme)”

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 Oedipus: A Journal of Comic Intellectual Pursuits. ed. Peter Bregman, John Klemm, Michelle Kristula, & Michael Corrado. Unnumbered (First Issue?), Undated (1976). The Discordian Society, Charlottesvelle Chapter: Charlottesville, Virginia. Offset on Newsprint, 24 pp.

  

An (first? only) issue of a magazine issued by the chapter of the Discordian Society based at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. It contains many satirical references to the United States Centennial celebrations of that year (providing intenal evidence of the publication date), a phenomenon with heightened impact at the university founded by Thomas Jefferson, around who a local cult-status has developed.

  

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The Pagan: A Magazine of Unprofessional Letters, ed. Edward M. Lind & Frederick C. Rassman. No. 1-8, March 1903-June 1905. Custom-bound in hardcover Wide 16-mo, 131 pp. Personal copies with bookplate of magazine's editor, Edward M. Lind.

 

The first true Zine network – non-commercial pamphlets printed by (often adolescent) amateurs in tiny editions on personal reproduction devices at home to be traded, rather than sold, through a network that spanned both local and postal communities – was known as the Amateur Press movement. (The term came nearly a century later) It began forming during the 1860s in America, and in 1876 the National Amateur Press Association was founded; self-declared non-professionals traded their home-printed pamphlets through massive mailing lists, like the later mail art and zine networks. The Pagan, which appeared 27 years later, was noted as one of the more sophisticated literary zines, and the primary editor Lind discusses in an early essay the difficulty of editing for quality within the all-submissions-accepted tradition of the Amateur Press. The journal's taste tends toward personal essays and the more Aesthetic and Pre-Raphaelite strains of mainstream Victorian poetry, though as with most Amateur Press magazines it devoted far more space to criticism of amateur writers and journals, and especially to the interminable and seemingly substanceless internal politics of the NAPA than to printing literature itself. This unique bound copy of the journal's first two years collects Lind's own personal copies, as declared by his bookplate.

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Pagany: A Native Quarterly. Ed. Richard Johns. Vol. III, No. 1, Winter 1931. New York. Softcover octavo, 66 pp.

Pagany was a generally imagist-oriented journal that was part of a network of self-identified "advance-garde" and "experimental" literature small-magazines (as vividly communicated in the numerous adverts for allied journals) attempting to make some progress in perennially culturally conservative America. Though the work is much, much more conventional than that in European avant-garde journals twenty years earlier, it does represent work that is much more adventurous than the vast majority of anglophone writing at the time, alongside a fair number of tiresome pastiches of Hemmingway (stew on that for a minute...).
  
This issue brings together a very interesting confluence of marginal forces from the European avant-garde, the Harlem Renaissance, and (incipient) genre Horror: we find a long piece of experimental criticism by Jean Cocteau that spirals around motifs and reflections on de Chirico, a great poem by the African-American writer Jean Toomer, and a naturalist story by August Derleth, who would go on to become an influential Weird Fiction writer, the founder of Arkham House press, and the primary champion and publisher of Lovecraft when his work was in danger of falling into oblivion. There are some then-or-now-big names such as W.C. Williams and Robert Fitzgerald and Robert McAlmon, but some of the most interesting work is by now-unknown poets such as Dudley Fitts, Tess Slesinger, Edwin Rolfe, Etta Blum, and C.A. Millspaugh.

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Pagany A Native Quarterly. Ed. Richard Johns. Vol. III, No. 3, Summer 1932. New York. Softcover octavo, 66 pp. Signed by Weird Fiction writer & publisher August Derleth.

Below: August Derleth's signature added beside the beginning of his contribution.

  See the previous entry for an over of Pagany. This issue was signed by August Derleth, who would soon shift his energies away from the naturalism of his stories in this journal to become one of the influential figures in the development of the Weird Fiction genre, on the page on which his contribution "Five Alone" to the issue begins. He also noted the page number on the cover, suggesting that it was sent by him in the mail as a presentation copy to a friend and/or collaborator – who, however, remains unidentified. It also includes the First Movement of Zukofky's classic "A" and a poem by Conrad Aiken.

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Les Papillons noirs [The Black Butterflies]. Edited & written by The Bibliophile Jacob. No. 1 (Jan. 1840). Sole Edition. Self-Published: Paris.  Paperback 32 mo., 93 pp.

 

The short-lived Romanticist proto-zine The Black Butterflies was one of the first self-published periodicals to heed the call of Gustave Karr in the first issue of his seminal underground newspaper The Wasps [Les Guêpes], of which this archive holds many early copies (see tab at top of page). Indeed, not only do the magazine's title, format, and design respond to that of Karr's and the journal is cited a few times within it, but this inaugural issue begins with an open letter to Karr, acknowledging The Wasps as a partial inspiration and declaring the two journals' "holy alliance" while distinguishing the new journal from the Wasp's combative, acerbic, and political tone.

The Black Butterflies was the mouthpiece of the prolific avant-garde writer and scholar Paul Lacroix, aka Bibliophile Jacob, represented elsewhere in this archive by his edition of Rabelais, a collection of historical tales for children, one of his personal bookplates, and a letter promoting his work from his friend and future brother-in-law Jean Duseigneur. Like his mentor Charles Nodier (who he replaced after the latter's retirement as head of the prestigious Arsenal library), he played many roles in the underground community: as a novelist he was a leading proponent of both Frenetic and Medievalist Romanticism in their extreme forms; as a scholar he pioneered the study of Medieval art and daily life; as a bibliophile, he was a central node of research and resources for the Romanticist community as it developed the genre of historical fiction, contributing greatly to the research behind the novels of Hugo, Dumas, Maquet, and Balzac among others; as a journalist, activist and historian he helped to lead the restoration and anti-gentrification campaigns to save Notre-Dame and many other medieval buildings from demolition; as an editor he compiled revised and annotated editions of long-neglected books to establish the Romanticist anti-canon.

The contents are heterogeneous, most relating to contemporary events in both the political realm (where  the positions staked are generally liberal, though without the acidity of Karr's magazine) and the cultural and underground communities. Most take the form of humorous satirical essays commenting on a very wide variety of subjects both trivial and important, sometimes spinning out experimentally into flights of fantasy or scripted comedy sketches. Examples include a long tirade against the National Guard ("The National Guard is a magnificent utopia, invented or the military amusement of France's majority, and for the desolation of reasonable people."), a comedy sketch set at the Comic Opera, a criticism of the emerging idea of literary property (he chides the government for ignoring literature until it found it could apply the idea of Property to it), an argument by lawyers representing God and the Devil, wry comment about the Romanticist poet Lamartine into politics, and a satirical proposal to limit the limit the verbiosity of representatives in the Chamber of Deputies.
  

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Pastels in Prose. Ed. & Trans. Stuart Merrill. Preface by William Dean Howells. (1890). Sole Edition. Harper & Brothers, NY. Bookplate of James Rudolph Garfield, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, & Inscription by C.M. Kirkland.
 

 

Stuart Merrill, son of an American diplomat who had spent most of his youth in Paris, was a writer, theorist, leftist activist, a close friend of Mallarmé and a central figure in the Symbolist community. Pastels in Prose is an anthology of French avant-garde prose poems by 23 writers from the Frenetic Romanticist Louis (Aloysius) Bertrand through the Parnassian group to Merrill's own friends and colleagues in the Decadent and Symbolist community--including work by Huysmans (see "Literature") and Judith Gautier, daughter of Théophile (see elsewhere in the archive)--translated by Merrill during a short stint in the US while he trained for Law. This is the only book Merrill published in English, and the only one ever published in his native country; the following year he moved back to Europe forever. The brief introduction by the American Realist critic William Dean Howells initially seems an odd choice since Howell's strictures on text were diametrically opposed to what this collection represented; he was a close friend of Merrill, whose affinities were probably largely political--both were vocal supporters of the anarchists and workers implicated in the Haymarket riots and were otherwise involved with anarchist and socialist activity, for which Merrill's father disinherited him. Howell encouraged him to write in English for the more popular and lucrative American market, but Merrill consistently refused. 

       This copy has a particularly interesting history: its first owner is inscribed as C. C. Kirkland, with the date December 30th 1890"; at some point it passed into the hands of James Rudolph Garfield, the son of the American president--his bookplate has been positively identified. J.R. Garfield was a leader of the Progressive Party, a close adviser to Teddy Roosevelt, and served as Secretary of the Interior under him. The book was obtained on ebay for $25.00 postpaid; the seller did not mention the provenance of the copy.

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La Phalange: Revue de la science sociale (The Phalanx: Revue of Social Science). Year XV, 1st Series, Book 3. (June 1846) Bureaux de la Phalange: Paris. Softcover octavo, 127 pp.

La Phalange was the flagship mouthpiece of Fourierist socialism in France, and this representative issue shows how thoroughly integrated Fourierism was in the complex network of overlapping radical cultural and political communities of the time. Part of each issue was taken up with the gradual,sequential publication of Fourier's many unpublished manuscripts and notes, which filled out the already highly complicated system he presented in The Theory of the Four movements; the passages reprinted here include the continuation of a document (begun in the previous issue) on the Four Distributive Passions, and an article on the taxonomy of the Subversive Programme. Also in this issue are two examples of Fourierist poetry by the influential avant-garde poet Leconte de Lisle, a regular contributor who would go on to play a major role in the Parnasse Contemporain network; a fascinating early example of socialist art theory and criticism by Gabriel-Désire Laverdant, who contributes an in-depth Fourierist review of the Salon of 1846 beginning with a commentary on Fourierist art theory and a statistical breakdown of what kinds of subjects were associated with positive versus negative emotional affects in this salon as compared to previous years, and an assertion of the value of heterogeneity, lack of dogma, and personal experimentation in a Fourierist worldview (a position that highlights Fourierism's strong proto-anarchist tendencies); a review of Messianism and the Official Church, by the Polish mystic revolutionary Miisckievicz; an article comparing the emergence of socialist "Social Science" out of capitalist "Political Economy" to the emergence of Astronomy out of the pseudoscience of Astrology; part 2 of a series investigating the history of the idea of property; and an article on the notion of the Word in relation to the Christian trinity.

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The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest. Vol. 21. ed. Elbert Hubbard (June--Nov. 1905). The Society of Philistines, Aurora, New York. Hand-bound Hardcover 16-mo., 193 pp.

  

The Philistine was an American journal published by the Society of Philistines, a collective working in the Aestheticist-Socialist tradition most famously exemplified in Britain by Oscar Wilde and William Morris. In fact, here is a contemporary description from an earlier issue of The Philistine of its editor, the satirist, activist and bookmaker Elbert Hubbard, calling him the "American William Morris." Inspired by the agrarian socialism of Morris and the British Arts & Crafts movement, Hubbard founded the utopian community at Roycroft in New York, which thrived for twenty years until Hubbard was killed in the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, which precipitated US entry into World War I. Toward the end of his life however, Hubbard drifted toward the right in economic matters, becoming an advocate for Free Trade.

Beautifully designed and hand-printed on letterpress, each copy was wrapped in rough butcher-paper. Hubbard used the journal to attack all aspects of establishment culture, soaked in tongue-in-cheek humour rife with gags and neologisms. (Here is an entry on Hubbard and the Philistine in the Encyclopedia of American Humorists.) In doing so, he made a great many enemies among mainstream American  intellectuals, as shown in this hateful obituary by an enemy. His thought and work is preserved and continued today by a group of bibliophiles called The Roycrofters.

 
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Poèsies sociales des ouvriers. (Social Poetry by Labourers) Ed. Olinde Rodrigues (1841). First Ed. Paulin: Paris. Hardbound Octavo, 572 pp. Rebound w/ Library Binding on Aug. 24, 1937 by Hehn & Hoth; Bookplate etc., Stamps, Card etc. from library of Meadville Theological School, Chicago.

This anthology collects socialist poetry, songs, and plays written by both male and female auto-didact working-class writers, most of whom were otherwise unpublished; each piece notes not only the author's name but also the trade by which they earned their living. One of the first anthologies dedicated to giving unschooled manual labourers a voice within the developing socialist movement, it was edited by the radical Jewish activist and mathematician Olinde Rodrigues. Rodrigues was one of the leaders and principal theorists of the Saint-Simonist proto-Socialist movement, having been Saint-Simon's close friend and secretary prior to the latter's death. He was also responsible for coining the term "avant-garde" in its modern sense, in his 1825 essay, "L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel" ("The Artist, the Intellectual, and the Industrialist") in which he called for the formation of a community of experimental artists who would evolve new forms of culture, thought and behaviour to usher forth revolutionary change by peaceful means. Four years later Alphonse Brot, a co-founder of the Bouzingo, referred to himself as an adherent of the "avant-garde of Romanticism," at a time when his comrades O'Neddy, Borel, Duseigneur, and others are known to have been attending Saint-Simonist lectures and would soon describe their own activity in very similar terms. In fact, O'Neddy is known to have owned a copy of this book. This volume, with an extended preface by Rodrigues, re-affirms his project of poetry as a socially revolutionary force.

The copy in the Revenant archive was at one point housed in the library of the Unitarian Meadville Theological School in Chicago, probably as of 1937 when it was re-bound, where--according to the card, it was never checked out.

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Les Poètes libertins: anthologie de Poésies Légères du XVe siècle a nos jours. Ed. Georges Normandy. (1909). Louis-Michaud, Paris. Stamped "MARTIN ALDAO / PARIS, 1909", inscribed w/illegible signature & dated Aug. 28, 1985, w/light text corrections in pencil by previous reader.

 

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Présence Africaine: Africa's Own Literary Review. ed. Alioune Diop. No. 51, English Edition, Vol. 23 (Winter 1964). Presence Africain: Paris. Softcover Octavo, 189 pp.

 

Presence Africain is one of the leading international journals associated with Négritude and other pan-African socialist intellectual movements. Through its association with Négritude, it published both black and white Surrealists committed to anti-colonial activism, including Aimé Césaire, Leopold Sédar Senghor, and Michel Leiris, alongside Franz Fanon, Richard Wright, and several of the existentialists. In keeping with its pan-African mission, an English-language edition was published for some time. Wikipedia wrongly states that the English-language version ran only during 1961, but this issue proves that it was published at least intermittently into 1964. The journal is still published today. 

In addition to the lead articles listed in the cover image, this issue contains 'Problems of African Sociology' by L.V. Thomas, 'The Problem of African Languages' by P.F. Lacroix, 'Long Live Belisaire! (A Short Story)', by Guy Tirolien, 'On "Atheism" ' by J. Nfoulou, ' "La Tragedie du Roi Christophe" or African Independence Seen Through Haitian Eyes' by Lyliane Lagneau-Kesteloot, 'Dinah Sifou: King Oh the Nalus' by Baba Ibrahima Kaké, and 'The Batetala Rising in the 19th Century' by A.Z. Zousmanovitch, in addition to numerous small comments on recent events, book reviews, and poems.

This inscribed copy belonged Jimmy Garrett, a leading African-American activist, playwright, and political writer in San Francisco and, a few years later, in Washington, D.C. where he co-founded the Drum and Spear Bookstore. The shop was a hub of civil rights activism, hosting readings and workshops with activists from around the world. Among many other activities, Garrett went on to co-organise the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania in 1974.

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Real Needs: A Magazine of Co-ordination. Ed. & written by Charles A. Lindbergh. Vol. I, No. I. (March, 1916) Sole Edition. Self-Published, Little Falls, Minnesota / Washington, D.C. 
   

 
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Revue du Dix-neuvième siècle. Vol. 4, No. 6 (Nov. 5, 1837). Paris. Saddle-stitched Paperback Octavo, 60 pp.
 

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Revue de Paris. Vol. 7, No. 2, 13. Ed. Charles Malo. (July, 1834). Paris. Softcover Octavo, 71 pp, numbered 73-144.  With handrwitten historical & bibliographic notes from unidentified previous archivists.

 

 

During the mid-1830s the Revue de Paris was edited by Charles Malo (see also "Historiography" & "Personal Artifacts"), one of the most active and influential publishers of underground, as well as mainstream, Romanticism. His yearly Annales romantiques anthologies (see above) were the most condensed barometers of early avant-garde practice, making available the work of many writers otherwise almost unpublished, and the monthly Review de Paris provided a more constant stream of longer pieces, often in serial.
 

   The bulk of this issue consists of Vaux (called Vaux-Praslin in a note by a previous archivist, written in the corner of the cover), a piece of historical fiction by the mainstream Romantic Léon Gozlan, who was reputed to be the anonymous author of the smear-campaign of short stories parodying the Bouzingo (or Bousingot) group two years earlier in Le Figaro (see above), which had ironically done so much to establish their publish mythic persona. The copy belonged to at least two previous archivists, both of whom left contextual notes on the cover. The owner who wrote in pencil left an extensive note for future researchers (which I have yet to follow up, though I shall eventually):

"N.B. d'après un avis de la lie [Revue de Paris] de Juin 1834, p. 272 de T. VI, une eau-forte de Paul Huet, devoit accompagnée la présent livraison--M. Ph. Burty n'a pas connu cette eau-forte, et ne la cite pas si font elle ont qu'il[?] ait paru--dans sa Paul Huet, Dec. 1869. ni 8."

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Revue de Paris. Ed. Charles Malo. Vol. 23-24 Collected (1840). Sole Collected Edition. Paris.
 

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Revue de Paris. Ed. Charles Malo. Vol. 28 (1841). Sole Collected Edition. Paris.

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Saynètes et monologues (Comedy Sketches and Monologues), 4th Series. (1884). Tresse: Paris. Hardcover Quarter-Leather 16-mo. 266 pp.

   

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Les Soirées de Médan (The Evenings in Médan). Ed. Émile Zola. (1897). New Edition. Charpentier: Paris. Hardcover Quarter-Leather Sextodecimo, entirely disbound. Ex-Libris Rutgers University Library.

 

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Sparrow, No. 34: Antonin Artaud's To Have Done With The Judgement of God, translated by Clayton Eschleman & Norman Glass, July 1975. Ed. John Martin. Black Sparrow Press: Los Angeles. Softcover Octavo, 24 pp.

 
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Les Temps: Journal des progrès. Vol. 21, no. 864 (Tuesday, Sept. 12, 1833). Afternoon edition: Paris. Paperback folio, 4 pp.

Les Temps was a moderate Liberal daily newspaper representing the Capitalist centre-left, with close ties to the July Monarchy. This issue contains a review of Théophile Gautier's roman-à-clef of avant-garde subculture, Les Jeunes-France. While admitting Gautier's talent, the unsigned article admonishes him for his too-experimental use of language, his delight in outré, Frenetic themes, and his association with the Jeunes-France group itself, which is attacked and criticized as the greatest offender among the Romanticist avant-garde (Petrus Borel receives particular negative mention). Like most contemporary reviews of the Jeunes-France by moderate-Liberal critics, its over-riding theme is a plea to renounce the formal, political, and thematic "excesses" of radical Romanticism and return to an idiom acceptable to the bourgeoisie, with implicit promises of greater critical support should the writer "return to the fold."

This and articles like it reflect the pressure exerted upon young avant-gardists during the years 1833-36, as the July Monarchy was re-asserting control of the press, quelling massive proletarian protests and uprisings in Paris, Lyon, and other major cities, and mainstream Romantics associated with the regime, now in positions of critical and editorial control, silenced radicals by directly or indirectly closing them off from opportunities for publication. This movement toward hegemony (which reflected the destruction of the small press network in Paris, analyzed by Karr in his 1838 introduction to Les Guêpes) contributed to the dissolution of the Jeunes-France group by 1835, practically ended the literary lives of intransigent avant-gardists like Borel and O'Neddy, and forced others such as Nanteuil, Boulanger and Brot into hack-work. Gautier himself managed to re-figure his practice into one which maintained his real interests in a form acceptable (if not popularly appealing) to the emerging literary establishment.

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The Tryout. Vol. 17, No. 6, (Oct. 1935). Ed. C.W. Smith. Self-Published: Haverhill, Massachusetts. Saddle-stitched softcover  16-mo., 24 pp.
 

  

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An Uncensored Anthology, Written by Diverse Hands. Ed. Peter Pauper [Peter Beilenson], illust. Carl Cobbledick. 1939. Peter Pauper Press: Mount Vernon, new York. Clothbound Hardcover 16-mo. with hard slipcase.

   

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Weird Tales: A Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual. Vol. 34, No. 3 (Sept. 1939). New York. Softcover Octavo, 28 pp.

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The Westerner: An Amateur Monthly. Vol. 2, No. 1 (May, 1899). Ed. Eugene D. Bedal. Self-Published, Printed by Guy N. Phillips: Sioux City, Iowa. Unbound softcover Octavo, 12 pp.
 

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The Westerner: An Amateur Monthly. Vol. 1, No. 9 (Jan., 1899). Ed. Eugene D. Bedal. Self-Published, Printed by Guy N. Phillips: Sioux City, Iowa. Unbound softcover Octavo, 12 pp. Stamped: Specimen Copy [Review Copy?] 

 

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Works: A Quarterly of Writing. Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring, 1968). Ed. John Hopper & Robert Brotherson. AMS Press: New York, NY. Softcover Octavo, 123 pp.