An Evening with Mr Teste by Paul Valery First English translation 1925

VALERY, Paul. An Evening with Mr. Teste. Translated by Ronald Davis. Avec une preface inedite de l'auteur. Paris: Ronald Davis, 1925.
 
135 x 200 mm. 53 pp. Original printed wrappers, retaining the rare original acetate jacket with a few small chips and short tears along the folds. Book itself near fine, exceptionally fresh with unopened (uncut) pages throughout. One of only 200 numbered copies printed on verge Rives paper, this being No. 131 (from a total edition of 208 copies).
 
First English translation of Valery's celebrated philosophical novella La Soiree avec Monsieur Teste, originally published in French in 1896. This edition contains a specially written and previously unpublished preface by Valery in French before Ronald Davis's English translation. Monsieur Teste, Valery's enigmatic intellectual hero, became one of the defining literary figures of early twentieth-century French modernism, exploring memory, consciousness and the limits of rational thought. Issued by the Paris bookseller and publisher Ronald Davis in an edition of only 208 copies, the work is now rare.