Aveux non Avenus.

inscribed to Sylvia Beach

An exceptional association copy, inscribed: 'to Sylvia Beach / In memory of old days, and / in hope of no worse ones I throw / our friendship as a bridge, whereon / I hope we may meet many times. / Claude Cahun / Paris - Juin 1930'.

Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier lived together as a couple from 1919 until Monnier's death by suicide in 1955. It was Monnier who initially encouraged Cahun to write Aveux Non Avenus.

Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore are the pseudonyms used by Lucy Schwob and her life-long lover and step-sister, Suzanne Malherbe. Though Cahun saw herself primarily as a writer and viewed her photographic work as a largely private pursuit, it is for her self-portraits that explore ideas around gender indeterminacy through her physical appearance and dress that she is now best known.

Aveux non Avenus is an anti-memoir comprising a series of texts: poems, literary aphorisms, fables, snatches of conversation, recollections of dream sequences and philosophical thoughts, ideas and meanderings, loosely grouped into nine chapters interspersed with photomontages by Moore featuring photographs and self-portraits by Cahun. Cahun wrote most of the text between 1919 and 1925, with a final section completed in 1928.

In 1920, Cahun and Moore settled in Montparnasse. They became a prominent couple in avant-garde literary and theatre circles, befriending Sylvia Beach, owner of the English-language bookshop Shakespeare & Company and her partner Adrienne Monnier, owner of La Maison des Amis des Livres.

Cahun began writing with Monnier's encouragement. In 1926, with most of the book completed, she wrote to Monnier: 'You have told me write a confession because you know only too well that this is currently the only literary task that might seem to me first and foremost realisable, where I feel at ease, permit myself a direct link, contact with the real world, with the facts … Don't get your hopes up.'

Two years later, writing: 'I told you that I wanted to publish my [book] … as a psychological and moral experiment. On myself, I dream … of publishing with you (!) with a preface by you (!) saying everything good you think about me, and everything bad: all the reservations that my symbolist entrapment, my infantile stubbornness, the gaps in my knowledge, my blindness, my incomprehension of life etc., make you have about me.'

Cahun's deviation from her brief meant that Monnier refused to support the project. Escaping easy classification, Aveux Non Avenus did not find a large audience at the time of publication but is now viewed as a pioneering piece of experimental female and queer writing.

Following the rise of Fascism in Europe, the couple settled in Jersey in 1937. After the German occupation of the Channel Islands in 1940, they became active resistance fighters and propagandists, printing anti-Nazi flyers and impersonating German soldiers in order to distribute them. For four years, this two-woman operation successfully gave the impression of a large-scale resistance movement. They were eventually captured by the Nazis and sentenced to death, but were freed following the Allied liberation of the Channel Islands.

First editon, number 24 of 55 hors commerce copies on vélin pur fil Lafuma from a total edition of 500, presentation copy inscribed in black ink on the half-title; 8vo (219 x 170 mm, 8½ x 6¾ in); ten photographic plates printed in héliogravure, one illustration in the text; uncut and partially unopened, white wrappers printed in black, grey and red, spine and wrappers lightly toned, minor foxing, reading creases to spine, an excellent copy in custom drop spine box ; [vi], vi, 238, [8]pp.

Fotografia Pública: Photography in Print 1919-1939 no.122; The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to the Present pp92-3; The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century pp62-3; What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women 1843-1999 p64.