Album de la Pléiade

Some of the albums (Breton, Stendhal, Éluard, Saint-Simon).

Detailed view of the binding of a volume in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

The Album de la Pléiade^[1] is a book published every summer (in May) by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade usually about one of its authors but sometimes about authors from a specific time period (1961 recording and 1989 album) or about an important topic of the collection(1970 and 2009 albums).^[2] The selection of an author generally corresponds to a major new addition to the corpus of his or her works in the Bibliothèque, which is a French-language collection of classic French and international texts. The book is richly illustrated and focusses on iconography. An accompanying bibliographical text is prepared by a renowned specialist of the selected author.

The Album de la Pléiade share the same leather-bound format and gold lettering with the books of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, but have generally fewer pages and are 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 (60's-70's) books are also often really priced compared to the newer ones due to the rarity, even if the author is less popular. The oldest of all being the Dictionnaire des Auteurs de la Pléiade (Dictionary of the authors of the Pléiade) published in 1960 and always sold over $400–$450, sometimes even found over $600 if it looks perfectly new.

List of the albums

Here is a list of the Album de la Pléiade:

• 1960: Dictionary of the authors of the Pléiade, considered as the precursor to the albums.
• 1961: Poètes du XVIème siècle, a 33 rpm record containing poems by 16th century poets read by renowned actors (the best-known being María Casares) and accompanied by a booklet in Pléiade format containing all featured poems

1. 1962: Honoré de Balzac
2. 1963: Émile Zola
3. 1964: Victor Hugo
4. 1965: Marcel Proust
5. 1966: Stendhal
6. 1967: Arthur Rimbaud
7. 1968: Paul Éluard
8. 1969: Saint-Simon
9. 1970: Classical theater
10. 1971: Guillaume Apollinaire
11. 1972: Gustave Flaubert
12. 1973: George Sand
13. 1974: Charles Baudelaire
14. 1975: Fyodor Dostoevsky
15. 1976: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
16. 1977: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
17. 1978: Blaise Pascal
18. 1979: Henry de Montherlant
19. 1980: Jean Giono
20. 1981: Paul Verlaine
21. 1982: Albert Camus
22. 1983: Voltaire
23. 1984: Colette
24. 1985: André Gide
25. 1986: André Malraux
26. 1987: Guy de Maupassant
27. 1988: François-René de Chateaubriand
28. 1989: The writers of the French Revolution
29. 1990: Lewis Carroll
30. 1991: Jean-Paul Sartre
31. 1992: Jacques Prévert
32. 1993: Gérard de Nerval
33. 1994: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
34. 1995: William Faulkner
35. 1996: Oscar Wilde
36. 1997: Louis Aragon
37. 1998: Julien Green
38. 1999: Jorge Luis Borges
39. 2000: NRF
40. 2001: Marcel Aymé
41. 2002: Raymond Queneau
42. 2003: Georges Simenon
43. 2004: Denis Diderot
44. 2005: The Book of One Thousand and One Nights
45. 2006: Jean Cocteau
46. 2007: Montaigne
47. 2008: André Breton
48. 2009: Holy Grail
49. 2010: Molière
50. 2011: Paul Claudel
51. 2012: Jules Verne
52. 2013: Blaise Cendrars
53. 2014: Marguerite Duras
54. 2015: Giacomo Casanova

Notes and references

1. Collections of Gallimard's Editions. "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade". Collections From Gallimard. Gallimard. Retrieved 9 June 2011.
2. Liberlibri Ancient Books. "List of the albums of the Pléiade". Retrieved 9 June 2011.