Mallarmé et ses éditeurs : les deux éditions du Corbeau (1875), les deux états de L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876-1886)

Résumé 0

In an important article published in 1989 in Print Quarterly, Juliet Wilson-Bareau and Breon Mitchell have demonstrated that the copies of the bilingual edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Le Corbeau, in the French translation by Stéphane Mallarmé, illustrated by Édouard Manet and published by Richard Lesclide, were divided into two typographically different editions. According to the authors, the first edition, sold from June 1875, had been preceded by a trial edition made in May and then discarded because of minor composition errors in the English text which could not be corrected, for the characters had been redistributed and the impression made from a stereotypic mould. On the strength of the typographer-printer’s legal registration statement, the authors have also deemed that the actual print run of the final edition was not 240 copies, as stated on the colophon, but 150. This article, rewriting the rather complex history of this book from new documents published in 1994 by Michael Pakenham, shows that if two editions are indeed to be distinguished, the first one, prudently printed in about 150 copies, was not preceded but followed by a second one, typeset and printed in the summer of 1875, as a complement to the previous one, so that the total of the two editions, that Mallarmé took care to make as typographically identical as possible and which are illustrated with the same lithographies, could reach the announced number of 240. The second part of this article continues the seemingly simpler story of Mallarmé’s L’Après-midi d’un faune—illustrated with four Manet woodcuts and published by Alphonse Derenne in 1876—up to 1886 when the publisher Léon Vanier, after buying from Derenne and Mallarmé the unsold copies printed on laid paper, added two silk ribbons, one pink, the other black, they were missing, and had new price labels printed in order to fasten to the cover the end of the new ribbons threaded through the second cover board. If the look, and above all, the fraying of the ribbons’ free ends permit to distinguish the 1876 copies from the copies trimmed ten years later, the price labels typography, similar but slightly different, is a surer way of recognizing the two states. The four price labels of the edition are reproduced (12 francs, 25 francs, and the two 15 francs labels).