Jean Charcot. Preface de Paul Check. Edition originale. ‘L’homme du ‘Pourquoi-Pas?” [half-title]. Limited numbered first edition. Inscribed by the author

20 cm. [ii], iv, 5 – 242 pp. with 1 text illustration, 17 plates (incl. frontispiece and 3 maps). Contemporary marbled boards with papered spine, ms title labels on spine. Browning to spine, previous owner’s name and address on upper board, magazine cutting with author’s portrait and short text pasted to free endpaper, textblock uncut, author’s inscription on half-title. * No. 29 of the limited edition of 145 copies on Lafuma-Navarre wove paper (numbered 1 – 135, and 10 copies lettered a – j, not for sale). * Very rare first limited edition of the biography of the great Arctic and Antarctic explorer Jean Charcot. Marthe Oulie (1901 – 1941) was a French archeologist, adventurer and writer. She knew Charcot personally and so this biography is ‘un hommage et un tribut’ (preface). This copy inscribed by the author to Belgian writer Emma Lambotte ‘avec mes sentiments tres sympathiques’. * So far this limited edition appears to be only known from the limitation statement on the verso of the title in the trade edition. Rosove includes it, however does not list any copies, and does not note the number of plates of this limited edition. The book was advertised in the ‘La Nouvelle Revue Francaise’, No. 292, Jan 1938′, p. 11), the trade edition at 21 francs and the limited edition at 125 francs. The normal French trade edition only had 2 plates (portrait and maps), but this limited edition on wove paper has 17 plates (the same number as the first English edition published the following year – Rosove counts 18 plates here as the maps are on a double-sided plate). * We have also been unable to locate any copies of this first limited French edition in any library catalogues. * Very rare.- Rosove 244.A2 (not noting the additional plates).