Les Églogues de Virgile
One of six copies of the French edition printed on vellum, lettered A–F — this is copy C — with four complete additional suites of Maillol's woodcuts, bound in 1932 by Georges Mercier of Paris. In mint condition.
Details
Large quarto (approx. 320 × 240 mm). 110 leaves, plus 3 unnumbered leaves. Printed throughout on very strong, snow-white goatskin parchment. With 43 woodcuts drawn and cut by Aristide Maillol; the initials designed by Maillol and cut by Eric Gill; the title-page designed by Eric Gill.
The edition in French was limited to 292 copies: six on parchment, lettered A–F; thirty-six on imperial Japanese paper, numbered in Roman figures; and two hundred and fifty on the hemp-and-linen paper made for the book at Montval, numbered in Arabic figures. The colophon of the parchment issue records that copies A–F were “printed on the skin of goats from Morocco.” The present copy is lettered C.
Bound in dark green crushed morocco (maroquin écrasé), the spine lettered in gilt, with olive-green morocco doublures, signed and dated “Georges Mercier, 1932.” Slipcase covered in green marbled paper, repeated on the flyleaves.
Eighteen Years
Harry Graf Kessler — diplomat, patron, and, in W. H. Auden's phrase, “a crown witness of our times” — put the idea of a Virgil illustrated by Aristide Maillol to the sculptor as early as 1904. The Klassik Stiftung Weimar records the date flatly: “Harry Graf Kessler stellte die Idee bereits 1904 vor.” Printing began in the spring of 1914. The war stopped it. It did not resume until June 1925, and the last sheet was pulled in April 1926 — a book carried across a world war, a collapsed empire and a hyperinflation by one man's refusal to abandon it.
The Cranach-Presse Virgil is not merely a fine book of its period; it is the book against which the period is measured. The Klassik Stiftung Weimar calls it “ein herausragender Druck, der noch heute zu den schönsten des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts zählt” — an outstanding piece of printing that still counts today among the most beautiful of the early twentieth century. Renate Müller-Krumbach, the press's bibliographer, puts it more simply: “Eines der schönsten Bücher des 20. Jahrhunderts.”
Kessler's Rule for the Page
Kessler set down in his diary the principle that governs every opening of this book — the reason its woodcuts sit in the text rather than on it:
“The book illustration should spring from the type, its black and white tonal effect, and not tear white holes or make black smears in the even colour of the text. It should therefore be principally linear, as the type is made up of lines. The thickness and thinness of the lines in the illustration should remain within the bounds of the thick and thin strokes of the letters, and the lines should, as much as possible, be distributed in the white of the picture plane as the letters are in the white of the page, so that there should not be larger white spaces in the picture area than in the text block.”
Maillol at the Block
Maillol was a sculptor, not a wood-engraver; Kessler demanded the woodcut precisely because it was, in his words, the oldest and most primordial of the graphic printing techniques. Kessler watched him work and wrote it down:
“In the afternoon he carved the small fleeing kid for the second Eclogue. Primitiveness of his tools. No tracing paper for tracing, but just ordinary paper … done with the tip of his wife's scissors which were lying around. As he cut he constantly complained that he had no sharp knife and had to work with a broken-off chisel. He made the trial proofs by blacking the cuts with an old cork, laying the paper down and rubbing back and forth with a fork.”
And, on the impossibility of scheduling him: “It's terrible to assign a workload to a genius as if he were a schoolboy.” Kessler's verdict on why it was worth it: “Maillol himself is a poet, even if his poetry is expressed not in words but in stone and clay, through proportions and lines.”
The initials tell the same story. Maillol painted the ornaments with a brush, a different ornament for each letter, at a rate Kessler found scarcely credible — five minutes for the invention and execution of each. He then gave a precise instruction for the cutting, to be carried out by Eric Gill: not to imitate the irregularities of the brush strokes, but to cut evenly and uniformly.
The Type, the Paper, the Hands
The type. The roman was modelled on the Venetian type of Nicolas Jenson of 1470, under the supervision of Emery Walker — the engraver and printer whose 1888 lecture had set William Morris on the road to the Kelmscott Press, and who went on to co-found the Doves Press. The punches were cut by Edward Prince, the last of the great English punchcutters; the accompanying italic was designed by Edward Johnston, the reviver of the broad-nib hand and Gill's own master.
The paper. For the ordinary copies Kessler had a paper made expressly for the book at Montval, at the mill established in 1912 by the sculptor's nephew Gaspard Maillol: a wove sheet of pure hemp and linen fibre, watermarked with Maillol's La Méditerranée. Maillol's own account of why this mattered has lost none of its bite: “Somebody or other reproached me that I make naive woodcuts, whereas Virgil is not at all naive but, rather, elegant … whether one makes books for kings, for students or for whores, the first thing one needs is beautiful paper.”
The parchment. Six copies were not printed on the Montval paper at all. They were printed on goatskin — parchment so white and so strong that the impression of Maillol's blocks on it is unlike any paper pull. This is one of those six.
This Copy: Four Suites, Not Three
The colophon undertakes to supply each parchment copy with three additional suites of the woodcuts. This copy carries four, complete:
- in black, on old papier Japon;
- in black, on deep-yellow Japanese paper;
- in red, on China paper;
- in bistre, on vellum (calfskin).
Four suites on four different substrates, bound with a parchment copy of the book itself, is the fullest state in which the Cranach-Presse Virgil is known to exist.
The Binding: Georges Mercier, 1932
Georges Mercier (Paris, 1885–1939) directed one of the most exacting Parisian binding ateliers of the interwar years; his death in 1939 closed it. The present binding, signed and dated 1932, is squarely of his best period: dark green crushed morocco, gilt-lettered spine, and full olive-green morocco doublures — a treatment reserved for books their owners regarded as permanent. The slipcase is covered in a green marbled paper that answers the flyleaves.
Rarity
Six copies on parchment out of 292 is two per cent of the French edition, and one of the six was a printer's copy. As of July 2026 no copy of the parchment issue is offered in the trade anywhere we can retrieve, nor catalogued for any forthcoming sale — an Atelier Zweig survey of AbeBooks, ZVAB, Iberlibro, Biblio, Antiqbook, Alibris, Antikvariat.net, Catawiki, eBay, the ILAB book search, and the stock of eighteen specialist dealers in Europe and North America, together with the forward catalogues of the principal auction indexes. Every copy of the Virgil presently for sale in the world — seven of them — is an ordinary-paper copy.
Condition
In mint condition, in an elegant, masterfully crafted binding by Georges Mercier, with its matching slipcase.
A note in the interest of full description: at three openings the page carries blank space where a woodcut was expected. Maillol never forgave it — “I made the woodcuts for the Eclogues in such a way that, together with the text, they would fill the page and leave no empty spaces. And he made empty spaces everywhere. He printed the book without informing me, because he knew I would not agree.” The blanks are a feature of the edition as issued, not a defect of this copy; a century on they read as the fingerprint of an eighteen-year argument between two men who were both right.
Provenance
The Heribert Tenschert Collection. Offered by Atelier Zweig as United States representative of Heribert Tenschert, Antiquariat Bibermühle.
Literature
Müller-Krumbach, Harry Graf Kessler und die Cranach-Presse in Weimar, 40 · Schauer II, 73 · Sarkowski 1813 · Rewald 8–52 · Brinks 63 · The Artist & the Book, 1860–1960 (Boston, MFA), 172 · From Manet to Hockney (V&A), 30 · Gill 328 · The Engraved Work of Eric Gill (V&A), 104 · Castleman, A Century of Artists Books, p. 110.
Full research dossier, collation notes and additional photography available on request. Atelier Zweig · Fine Books & Manuscripts · Marina del Rey, California · info@atelierzweig.com
