In bookstores starting October 5, 2017

Rimbaud’s letters from Africa, Kipling’s ballads, and Baffo’s erotic sonnets, selected and illustrated by Hugo Pratt. Three books in one slipcase, all celebrating literature and art.

In the last years of his life, between 1991 and 1994, Hugo Pratt chose to accompany with his watercolors rare works by Arthur Rimbaud, Rudyard Kipling, and Giorgio Baffo.

These collections, which are now extremely hard to find, are combined in a slipcase and accompanied by heretofore unpublished prefaces by one of the foremost experts on Hugo Pratt, Dominique Petitfaux.

Pratt’s work allows one to imagine that books held an important place in his life. From writers such as Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson, discovered at an early age, to the often very erudite later readings, the renowned illustrator never stopped expanding, throughout his entire lifetime, his brilliant library. His book collection, which aptly represented his insatiable curiosity, comprised about twenty thousand volumes at the time of his death, and had gradually taken over all the rooms of his house.

One might wonder why, in the vast inventory of his favorite books, Hugo Pratt chose Rimbaud’s letters from Africa, the military poems of Kipling, and the erotic sonnets of Baffo, an 18th century  Venetian poet. As Dominique Petitfaux points out in her preface, Pratt’s unexpected choice of these texts says a great deal about his literary tastes, and reveals the attraction that the creator of Corto Maltese felt towards writers whose destinies in some way echoed his own.

Rimbaud’s Ethiopia and the lure of an Elsewhere; Kipling’s colonial childhood and military culture; Baffo’s Venice and his passion for the feminine gender… By aligning himself with these authors in a gradual choice of preferences, Hugo Pratt takes us to the border between literature and art in one of his last and most intimate invitations to travel.

Slipcase set of 3 books

296 pages – 26,5 x 19,7 cm

Lettres d’Afrique d’Arthur Rimbaud 64 pages

Poésies de Rudyard Kipling 150 pages

Sonnets Erotiques de Giorgio Baffo, 80 pages

Publisher: Le Tripode

Language: French

ISBN-10: 237055097X

ISBN-13: 978-2370550972

45,00 €

www.le-tripode.net