Victor Hugo (1802–1885) occupies a place in French letters that no other nineteenth-century writer disputes. Leader of the Romantic movement from the preface to Cromwell (1827) and the battle of Hernani (1830), he embraced every genre with equal power: poetry (Les Contemplations, La Légende des siècles), the novel (Notre-Dame de Paris, Les Misérables, Les Travailleurs de la mer), theatre (Ruy Blas, Le Roi s'amuse) and political pamphlet (Napoléon le Petit, Les Châtiments). His nineteen-year exile in Jersey and then Guernsey (1851–1870), an obstinate refusal of the Second Empire, transformed the writer into a public conscience; his 1885 state funeral, which carried him from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, consecrated a fame that had become an institution.
For the bibliophile, Hugo is a continent unto himself. His first editions chart the history of Romantic-era publishing — Renduel for the collections of the 1830s, Hetzel and Lacroix for the great prose works of the exile years, Michel Lévy and later Calmann-Lévy for the last works — and copies in contemporary condition, paperback or in period half-binding, are keenly sought after. The poet's autograph inscriptions, in a broad and theatrical hand, rank among the most desirable of the century; his letters and manuscripts, like his pen-and-wash drawings, reveal a graphic artist praised by Baudelaire himself.
The bookshop regularly offers first editions, copies in contemporary binding and autograph material by Victor Hugo, each piece described, collated and guaranteed. Collectors will find here both the great texts of militant Romanticism and the more intimate testimonies of the man of Guernsey.
