James Cummins Bookseller

New York: Simon & Schuster in Collaboration with Éditions Verve, 1952.

Price: $6,000.00

About the item

First edition, American issue, printed in France. Accompanied by the separate [12] pp. quarto leaflet printing the captions to the photographs in English. pp. 29, and 126 photographic illustrations (some double-page) on rectos and versos of 62 plates. 1 vols. Folio. Beautiful Copy in Original Dust Jacket. Decorated paper covered boards after design by Henri Matisse. An unusually nice copy, near fine, in slightly tanned dust jacket (replicating Matisse's design) with a few smudges at the extreme lower edges, a short closed tear at the top edge of the front panels, and a few short tears and a small creased snag at the edges of the rear panel. Open Book 154-155; Parr / Badger, vol. 1, 208-209; Roth 134-135.

Item #338691

One of the defining books in the field of photography from the immediate post WWII years,. In his important introduction to this collection, Cartier-Bresson sums up the principles that would inspire the work of countless photographers for the next half-century or more: "There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment... To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression."
The design was undertaken by Teriade, with the collaboration of Marguerite Lang, and the photographs engraved and printed in heliogravure by Draeger Frères. This state of the dust jacket prints comments on the rear inner flap by Monroe Wheeler, Philippe Halsman, Jacob Deschin, et al.
The initial edition consisted of approximately 3000 French language copies and 7000 English language copies, and like any number of significant books, received highly positive reviews but sold only a slow trickle of copies. Because of the nature of the binding and dust jacket, copies in agreeable condition, as here, are few and far between.