Album de la Pléiade

Some of the albums (Breton, Stendhal, Éluard, Saint-Simon).

Detailed view of the binding of a volume in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

The Album de la Pléiade^[1] is a book published every summer (in May) by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade usually about one of its authors but sometimes about authors from a specific time period (1961 recording and 1989 album) or about an important topic of the collection(1970 and 2009 albums).^[2] The selection of an author generally corresponds to a major new addition to the corpus of his or her works in the Bibliothèque, which is a French-language collection of classic French and international texts. The book is richly illustrated and focusses on iconography. An accompanying bibliographical text is prepared by a renowned specialist of the selected author.

The Album de la Pléiade share the same leather-bound format and gold lettering with the books of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, but have generally fewer pages and are printed on thicker paper to allow the inclusion of many colour images.

The Albums are not for sale. They are offered by the booksellers to customers who purchase three books from the collection. They tend to be distributed very quickly and immediately become collectors' items. Because of this, the most popular books of the collection such as, among others, Album Proust (1965), Album Céline (1977) or Album Balzac (1962) can only be obtained on reselling markets at high prices (often found around $200–$300).^[2] The older (60's-70's) books are also often really priced compared to the newer ones due to the rarity, even if the author is less popular. The oldest of all being the Dictionnaire des Auteurs de la Pléiade (Dictionary of the authors of the Pléiade) published in 1960 and always sold over $400–$450, sometimes even found over $600 if it looks perfectly new.

List of the albums

Here is a list of the Album de la Pléiade:

Notes and references