Album de la Pléiade explained

See main article: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

The Album de la Pléiade^[1] is a book published every year in May by the "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade", a series of classic French and international texts by French publishing house éditions Gallimard. It is usually about an author published in the series, although occasionally about a collective from a specific time period (1961 recording and 1989 album) or an important topic of the collection (1970 and 2009 albums).^[2]

Featured authors are generally chosen upon their entry in the series or a major addition of their works.

Each album is richly illustrated and focusses on iconography, with an accompanying bibliographical text by a renowned specialist of the selected author. It is produced in the same format, leather-bound cover and gold lettering as volumes of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, but has generally fewer pages and is printed on thicker paper to allow the inclusion of many colour images.

The Albums are not for sale. They are offered by the booksellers to customers who purchase three books from the collection. They tend to be distributed very quickly and immediately become collectors' items. Because of this, the most popular books of the collection such as, among others, Album Proust (1965), Album Céline (1977) or Album Balzac (1962) can only be obtained on reselling markets at high prices (often found around $200–$300).^[2] The older (1960s-1970s) books are also often high priced due to their rarity, even if the author is less popular. The oldest, Dictionnaire des auteurs de la Pléiade (Dictionary of the Authors of the Pléiade), published in 1960 has always been the most expensive, selling for over $400–$450.

List of the albums

1960: Dictionnaire des auteurs de la Pléiade, a dictionary considered as the forerunner to the albums.
1961: Poètes du XVIe siècle, an LP record of poems by 16th-century poets read by renowned actors such as María Casares, with an appended booklet in Pléiade format containing all featured poems.

1962: Honoré de Balzac^[3]
1963: Émile Zola
1964: Victor Hugo
1965: Marcel Proust
1966: Stendhal
1967: Arthur Rimbaud
1968: Paul Éluard
1969: Saint-Simon
1970: Classical theater
1971: Guillaume Apollinaire
1972: Gustave Flaubert (1st)
1973: George Sand
1974: Charles Baudelaire (1st)
1975: Fyodor Dostoevsky
1976: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1977: Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1st)
1978: Blaise Pascal
1979: Henry de Montherlant
1980: Jean Giono
1981: Paul Verlaine
1982: Albert Camus
1983: Voltaire
1984: Colette
1985: André Gide
1986: André Malraux
1987: Guy de Maupassant
1988: François-René de Chateaubriand
1989: “The Writers of the French Revolution”
1990: Lewis Carroll
1991: Jean-Paul Sartre
1992: Jacques Prévert
1993: Gérard de Nerval
1994: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
1995: William Faulkner
1996: Oscar Wilde
1997: Louis Aragon
1998: Julien Green
1999: Jorge Luis Borges
2000: NRF
2001: Marcel Aymé
2002: Raymond Queneau
2003: Georges Simenon
2004: Denis Diderot
2005: One Thousand and One Nights
2006: Jean Cocteau
2007: Michel de Montaigne
2008: André Breton
2009: the Holy Grail
2010: Molière
2011: Paul Claudel
2012: Jules Verne
2013: Blaise Cendrars
2014: Marguerite Duras
2015: Giacomo Casanova
2016: William Shakespeare
2017: Georges Perec
2018: Simone de Beauvoir
2019: Romain Gary
2020: Joseph Kessel
2021: Gustave Flaubert (2nd)
2022: Franz Kafka
2023: Louis-Ferdinand Céline (2nd)
2024: Charles Baudelaire (2nd)

Notes and References

Web site: Collections of Gallimard's Editions . Bibliothèque de la Pléiade . Collections From Gallimard . Gallimard . 9 June 2011 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20110725111333/http://www.gallimard.fr/ecoutezlire/fiche_pleiade.htm . 25 July 2011 .
Web site: Liberlibri Ancient Books. List of the albums of the Pléiade. 9 June 2011. dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20110310053320/http://www.liberlibri.com/album_pleiade.htm . 10 March 2011.
Although the 1960 dictionary and the 1961 record and booklet are forerunners, the series was formally started only in 1962, the Balzac album being counted as No. 1 by Gallimard.