Author: Paul Valéry.
Title: Le Cimetière marin.
Publisher: Paris: Émile-Paul Frères, 1920. First edition, first printing, one of 500 copies on Mittineague paper.
Language: Text in French.
Size: 8.5 ×6 inches.
Pages: Unpaginated.
Binding: Very good original publisher’s printed cream wrappers, featuring Valéry’s characteristic ornamental border enclosing the title panel (hinges fine, covers with mild spotting, soft toning from age, and light edge wear consistent with a century-old French paper wrapper. spine intact, with only minor surface wear; rear wrapper with offsetting outline from previous storage - as shown) under a protective removable mylar cover.
Content: Very good content (clean, uniformly toned pages with scattered faint foxing — as shown). Text block tight; gatherings unopened in places. Limitation leaf present, stating the edition: 7 copies on China paper (A–G), 49 copies on Arches (I–XLIX), and 500 copies on Mittineague paper (1–500), this being one of the 500, justified on the colophon (454?) — as shown. Poem printed with wide margins and elegant typographic design. No markings, no annotations.

Estimate: (USD 500– 700).

The book: A true cornerstone of 20th-century French poetry, this first edition of Le Cimetière marin marks one of Paul Valéry’s most celebrated and enduring works — a philosophical meditation on the sea, consciousness, immortality, and the fragile equilibrium between tranquillity and movement. Published in 1920 by Émile-Paul Frères, this edition is prized for its typographic purity and its limited, finely printed run, of which this copy belongs to the numbered series printed on Mittineague paper.

A poem of luminous clarity and inward tension, Le Cimetière marin blends classical rigor with modern introspection. Its famous concluding line — Le vent se lève… il faut tenter de vivre ! — has echoed far beyond literature, inspiring generations of artists and thinkers. Most famously, this verse became the source and direct inspiration for the title of Hayao Miyazaki’s film The Wind Rises (Le vent se lève), produced by Studio Ghibli, where Valéry’s meditation on life, fragility, and creative urgency resonates deeply.

This first printing, preserved in its fragile original wrappers, represents the poem in its purest historical form — a landmark artifact of French symbolism and a highly desirable edition for collectors of modernist poetry.

The author: Paul Valéry (1871–1945), poet, essayist, and philosopher, stands as one of the major figures of French modernism. Associated with the Symbolists yet profoundly original, Valéry believed in poetry as a discipline of precision and intellectual clarity. His works — including La Jeune Parque, Charmes, and Variété — explore perception, consciousness, and the mechanics of thought. Le Cimetière marin is often considered the summit of his poetic achievement, revealing his lifelong fascination with the sea, geometry, and the mind’s oscillation between stillness and movement.