[Rarebooks] fa: PIERRE LOTI - Helen Scribner 1932 - INSCRIBED to ARTINE ARTINIAN

[ArCh]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, December 1. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/suob44h

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Helen M. Scribner: Pierre Loti, vu a travers son oeuvre. Poitiers: Societe Francais d'imprimerie, 1932. First edition. Tall 8vo (25 cm) in blue buckram, with the original printed wraps bound in; 194 pp.

A dissertation on the French writer Pierre Loti (1850-1923), INSCRIBED by the author to Artine Artinian, a celebrated translator and scholar of French literature who amassed one of the twentieth century's premiere collections of French manuscripts. On his death in 2005 at the age of ninety-seven, the New York Times in its obituary outlined Artinian's remarkable life: his beginnings as a young Romanian immigrant shining shoes in Attleboro, Mass., his thirty-year career as a professor of French at Bard College, his publication in 1955 of the authoritative Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, and his many years of meticulously accumulating his unrivaled manuscript collection, much of which can now be found at Bowdoin College and at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas. "He spoke eight languages and seemed to know everyone," including Paul de Man, Mary McCarthy, who immortalized him as Aristide Poncy, "an absent-minded professor of languages," in her novel The Groves of Academe, and Gore Vidal, who borrowed his name for the character of Dr. Artinian in his play The Best Man. Artinian's signature is on the front free-endpaper and the paste-down opposite bears his printed bookplate, with the motto, "maupassant, mon souci."

Binding with some sunning to the spine, bumping to the corners; contents browned, as usual, particularly at the edges of the text block. Loosely laid in is the author's card, with a manuscript inscription: "De la part de Helen Scribner." Tipped on to the front endpaper is a clipped contemporary review ("Wellesley Bookshelf") which begins: "Miss Helen M. Scribner, B.A., Wellesley 1930, Docteur de l'Universite de Poitiers, probably the youngest candidate to whom the doctorat de l'Universite was ever given, has written an interesting psychological study of Pierre Loti as he reveals himself in his works..."