Editions des Saints Peres is a French independent publishing house that produces facsimiles of manuscripts and typewritten texts of famous poets and prose writers. The publishing house was founded 10 years ago by the writer Jessica Nelson, first of all, the manuscripts of French writers were published: Charles Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau, Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, Arthur Rimbaud and others. The books were issued in a limited edition and numbered by hand.
Facsimiles are of great interest to connoisseurs of literature, who can get acquainted with the works in the form in which they were originally written. Light corrections and furious strikethroughs, intricate curls of letters and marginal drawings, comments and entire unpublished chapters - all this is available to the reader in full.
The idea to publish a facsimile was born by Nelson after visiting the National Library of France in Paris, where a huge number of manuscripts are kept. Against the background of the total digitization of literary works, the release of such books on expensive paper under a hard cover was a bold decision and justified itself. Every year the number of published books grows, and the search for new manuscripts turns into a real quest: Nelson and his colleagues go in search of rare copies, buying them at auctions or asking private collectors. One of the first published manuscripts, Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, was kept in an unknown location for 60 years until it surfaced at auction in the 2000s, and immediately attracted the attention of bibliophiles.
In 2017, the literary assortment expanded, the names of English and American authors appeared in the publisher's catalog: Charlotte Bronte, Lewis Carroll, Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Paul Auster. In addition, Editions des Saints Peres publishes letters and drawings of writers, composers, and politicians on separate sheets.
