Miracle Smith, by Claude Pascal

Coaraze: Les Editions Coaraze, 1955. Gonet, Jean de. 16mo. 30, (2)pp., + 3 inserted plates. From an edition of twenty-four copies, this is one of twelve printed on Alfa Ivoire paper and labeled for a month of the year. Signed by Arman, the illustrator, on the colophon page. Arman's contributed plates offer a relatively early glance at his realized style, which he developed in accordance with the Nouveau Réalisme movement of the mid-twentieth century. Along with Yves Klein and Claude Pascal (or Pascal Claude, as he sometimes signed in his more well-known career as a composer and music critic), he embraced a vision of the world that saw it as a series of images to be reformatted, reorganized, and reanalyzed. This particular edition also records the brief moment when Arman identified himself only by his given first name, "Armand," after the fashion of Van Gogh; in a couple of years he would change to "Arman." Claude Pascal's accompanying poetry takes a similarly esoteric view of reality, exercising a belief in the pictorial revolution necessary to art and literature.

Bound by Jean de Gonet in one of his Revorim bindings, a series of 200 "De Gonet Artefacts," in which de Gonet used as covers his invented Revorim material, a plastic made from reverse injection molding. The binding is signed and numbered by de Gonet on the verso of the upper cover. Along with the Revorim material is a red leather inlay, stamped in black, to upper cover, an orange leather spine with titling in black, and red cloth bands. A fine example of several French avant garde approaches.