Binding by Paul Bonet
On: André Suarès, Cirque (illustrated by Georges Rouault)
Paris: Ambroise Vollard, 1939 [not published]
Purchased as the gift of Mr. and Mrs. Hans P. Kraus, 1979
Bonet, innovator in luxury bindings and among the best known of twentieth-century French art binders, executed a number of bindings for Cirque. All variants on a single decorative theme, a style Bonet called à decor rayonnant, they evoke the blaze of radiating circus lights.
The book and binding make this the most splendid livre d'artiste in the Morgan's collections, in its enormous scale, original artwork, and quality of its paper and presswork.
Rouault worked on the series of illustrations over many years. The resultant book, however, was never formally published. It is likely that most of the few surviving sets of pages of text and illustrations vary in makeup. The present copy contains a large number of proofs of the illustrations.