Miller (Henry) Quiet Days in Clichy

Paris, The Olympia Press, 1956.

First edition with the images in the first state. 8vo. Original soft wraps with stiff self-wrappers designed by T. Tajiri and printed in black, grey & yellow.

Black & white photographs printed in gravure and laminated, as opposed to the matte second state. Rare.

A short, largely autobiographical novel recounting Miller’s impoverished, sexually adventurous bohemian life in Clichy, Paris, in the early 1930s. The text originated around 1940 as one of two commissioned pieces written for a private American collector of erotica, the manuscripts subsequently going missing for over a decade before resurfacing, and Miller rewrote both at Big Sur in 1956 for this edition. The book is illustrated with photogravure plates by Brassaï (pseud. Gyula Halász), whom Miller had already celebrated in The Wisdom of the Heart (1941) and on whom he partly based a character in Tropic of Cancer; the wrapper design is by the sculptor T. Shinkichi Tajiri.