[Paris]: Kickshaws, 1983. No. 136 of 500 copies. [30]pp, including [10] cut leaves. 4to. Wraps with printed vellum jacket, stab bound with white ribbon. Mild toning to covers, principally at spine; near fine.
First English-language edition of this ingenious work of conceptual poetry—a cut-book intervention on both the codex format and the sonnet—by French writer and Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau (1903-1976), originally published in France in 1961. Ten sonnets, each line of which has been cut horizontally to form overlaid strips, allowing any line from a particular poem to be recombined with any of the others for a total of 100,000,000,000,000 possible poems, all perfectly congruent in terms of metric and rhyme. This English translation by Kickshaws publisher John Crombie. Nice copy of an edition rather scarce in the trade.
