Robert Mapplethorpe / Arthur Rimbaud — A Season in Hell (1986)

• Published: The Limited Editions Club, New York, 1986
• Contributors: Translated by Paul Schmidt; photogravures by Robert Mapplethorpe
• Edition: First edition thus
• Limitation: Copy no. 10 of 1,000, signed by Mapplethorpe and Schmidt
• Binding: Full red morocco, lettered in black; black cloth slipcase; prospectus laid in
• Pages: 87 pp.
• Dimensions: 28.7 x 19.2 cm (11¼ x 7⅝ in)
• Language: French / English (parallel text)
• Signature: Signed by Mapplethorpe and translator Paul Schmidt in the colophon.
• Condition: Fine; previous owner's blind stamp on front free endpaper.

Rimbaud wrote Une saison en enfer in 1873, at eighteen, the summer Verlaine shot him in the wrist in Brussels. It is a prose poem of damnation and self-invention, and it became a founding text for twentieth-century poets and musicians, Patti Smith, Mapplethorpe's closest friend, among them.

For the Limited Editions Club, Mapplethorpe answered Paul Schmidt's translation with photogravures made by Jon Goodman, among them a rose wreathed in smoke, a revolver and a figure study. It is one of the few times he worked in fine printing, and the velvety blacks of gravure suit his taste for the nineteenth century. The text is printed letterpress and the book bound in red morocco.

Copy number 10 of 1,000, signed by Mapplethorpe and Schmidt.