Described as the ‘Proustian Holy Grail’ by Sotheby’s Paris (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium), one of just five special copies printed on Japanese paper of Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann sold for a premium-inclusive €535,000 (£471,780) in a sale of October 30.
In 1942 this copy of the first of the seven books that make up Proust’s ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ sequence was acquired at auction by Roland Saucier, a bibliophile and manager of the Gallimard bookshop in Paris who died in 1994.
It had initially been given by the author to Louis Brun. He was described by Sotheby’s as the ‘eminence grise’ to the publisher, Bernard Grasset, who himself thought the book “unreadable” but who in 1913 was persuaded by Brun to publish it – albeit at Proust’s expense.