VALERY, Paul.
Eupalinos or The Architect.
London: Oxford University Press, 1932.
$300.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152733
+$500
First Edition of Paul Valéry's Eupalinos or The Architect; Signed by Him
First edition in English of Paul Valéry’s celebrated Socratic dialogue on architecture and the creative mind. Octavo, original cream linen with gilt titles to the spine, the front board stamped in gilt with the title and an architectural ground plan. One of only 750 numbered copies, of which only the first 250 were signed by Valéry, this is number 91. Boldly signed by Paul Valéry on the limitation page. In very good condition with toning to the preliminary leaves. Translated with a preface by William McCausland Stewart. Name to the front free endpaper. A beautiful signed copy of one of the great meditations on art and making.
Paul Valéry was among the greatest French poets and thinkers of the twentieth century, a master of the Symbolist tradition celebrated for La Jeune Parque and Le Cimetière marin and elected to the Académie française in 1925. Eupalinos or The Architect is his profound dialogue in which the shades of Socrates and Phaedrus meditate, in the underworld, on architecture as the highest of the arts and on the mysterious kinship between the mind and the act of construction. First published in French in 1921, it takes its title from Eupalinos of Megara, the ancient Greek engineer who bored a celebrated tunnel through a mountain on the island of Samos. This first English translation was made by the scholar William McCausland Stewart.
Eupalinos or The Architect.
$300.00
In Stock