Rare Finds - A Guide to Rare Book Collecting

“Je vous detache ces quelques hideux feuillets de mon carnet de damne.”

Arthur Rimbaud, the enfant terrible of French symbolism, scandalized ninteenth-century Paris and London with his passionate, destructive affair with the poet Paul Verlaine. At the age of eighteen, while recovering from gunshot wounds inflicted by his older lover, Rimbaud completed A Season in Hell (Une saison en enfer), a lacerating prose poem that would go on to influence generations of artists, from the Surrealists to the Beats to Bob Dylan and Patti Smith.

Inspired by Rimbaud’s vision, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe contributed a series of eight dazzling photogravures to accompany the 1986 Limited Editions Club edition of A Season in Hell, among them his iconic horned self-portrait.

We offer a special signed limited edition of these photogravures, one of only 40 tall portfolios produced by Mapplethorpe three years before his death, each of the eight images numbered, initialed and dated by Mapplethorpe.