Gilbert Velaire / Gaston Ry - Histoire d'une Menagerie - 1946

First edition. A rare children's book, satirising Hitler's attempts to gather the nations together under his command. The animals are fighting for their freedom against a circus director/tamer, who is a a look-a-like of Adolf Hitler. The book takes as its premise, the tongue twister "Imagine and imaginary menagerie managed by an imaginary manager." Stiff card covers. A little marking and foxing to these. The covers have become detached from the block as some point and are now secured by archival tape. Slight loss of card to the top edge of the spine. Internally clean and tidy throughout with full page images presented in black with one colour (differs throughout). Vignettes also. Gaston Ry was an Algerian illustrator and satirist who contributed drawings to the Algerian periodical 'Le Canard sauvage'. Unpaginated by 50 pages. No date, circa 1946. Gaston Ry was Rene Rostagny (1902-1978). 27.5 x 22 cm. Conforms to WorldCat / OCLC: 458449553. A scarce item, there is only one library holding at the BnF. Edmond Charlot was Camus’s first publisher, and after the Allied landings of November 1942 he became “the publisher of Free France”. In Algiers. It’s a wartime fable for children. The circus animals rise up against a tyrannical ringmaster who is unmistakably Hitler. Gaston Ry was the pseudonym of René Rostagn OCLC records only one institutional copy, at the BnF. That makes this genuinely scarce, and it was printed in wartime North Africa on poor paper, so few have survived.

Estimate:$168.39

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