Bibliothèque de la Pléiade
Encyclopedia
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
series of books which was created in the 1930s by Jacques Schiffrin, an independent young editor. (After moving to New York to escape from Nazism, Schiffrin was a founder of Pantheon Books
Pantheon Books
Pantheon Books is an American imprint with editorial independence that is part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.The current editor-in-chief at Pantheon Books is Dan Frank.-Overview:...
). Schiffrin wanted to provide the public with reference editions of the complete works of classic authors in a pocket format. André Gide
André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
took an interest in Schiffrin's project and brought it into Gallimard
Éditions Gallimard
Éditions Gallimard is one of the leading French publishers of books. The Guardian has described it as having "the best backlist in the world". In 2003 it and its subsidiaries published 1418 titles....
, under which it is still published.
The Pléiade has a strong emphasis on works that were originally written in French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, though the collection also includes classics of world literature, such as bilingual editions of the works of William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
, or French edition of Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
's work. To date, more than 500 books have been published in the series, with 11 books generally published every year.
All the books offer a similar high quality appearance, leather bound, gold lettering on the spine and bible paper
Bible paper
Bible paper is a thin grade of paper used for printing books which have a large number of pages. Technically it is called lightweight offset paper and is a type of woodfree uncoated paper. It is used for making Bibles, encyclopedias and dictionaries. This paper grade often contains cotton or linen...
and have a practical small format which make them look like a small Bible. Each time period corresponds to a color of leather: 20th century is tobacco, 19th emerald green, 18th blue, 17th venetian red, 16th corinthian brown, the Middle Ages purple, Antiquity green, spiritual texts gray, and anthologies red. The books are sold in a transparent rhodoïd
Celluloid
Celluloid is the name of a class of compounds created from nitrocellulose and camphor, plus dyes and other agents. Generally regarded to be the first thermoplastic, it was first created as Parkesine in 1862 and as Xylonite in 1869, before being registered as Celluloid in 1870. Celluloid is...
dust jacket
Dust jacket
The dust jacket of a book is the detachable outer cover, usually made of paper and printed with text and illustrations. This outer cover has folded flaps that hold it to the front and back book covers...
, and inserted in a white printed cardboard slipcase, although multiple volumes are often sold in a single slipcase.
The books are critical editions, with annotations, comments, manuscript and editorial variants and accompanying documents. The preparation of these critical editions can take many years for a team of specialists. For foreign authors, new reference French translations are systematically created.
The "entry into the Pléiade" is considered a major sign of recognition for an author in France, and it is extremely rare that a living author is published in the Pléiade (examples are Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute was a French lawyer and writer of Russian Jewish origin.-Life:Sarraute was born Natalia/Natacha Tcherniak in Ivanovo , 300 km north-east of Moscow in 1900 , and, following...
, Julien Green
Julien Green
Julien Green , was an American writer, who authored several novels, including Léviathan and Each in His Own Darkness...
, Julien Gracq
Julien Gracq
Julien Gracq , born Louis Poirier in Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, in the French département of Maine-et-Loire, was a French writer. He wrote novels, critiques, a play, and poetry. His literary works were noted for their Surrealism.Gracq first studied in Paris at the Lycée Henri IV, where he earned his...
, Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera , born 1 April 1929, is a writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. Kundera has written in...
...). In 2008, the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
were published in the collection.
The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade also publishes an Album de la Pléiade
Album de la Pléiade
The Album de la Pléiade is a book published every summer by Bibliothèque de la Pléiade usually about one of its authors but sometimes about authors from a specific time period or about an important topic of the collection...
every Summer, which is an illustrated book in the same format as the rest of the series, usually dedicated to one of the writers but sometimes also dedicated to writers from a specific time period (1989 album) or to an important topic (1970 and 2009 albums) from the collection. The Albums are offered for free with the purchase of three books in the series. They are often collectioned
In the 1960s and '70s, an Encyclopédie de la Pléiade in the same format was also created, under the direction of Raymond Queneau
Raymond Queneau
Raymond Queneau was a French poet and novelist and the co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle .-Biography:Born in Le Havre, Seine-Maritime, Queneau was the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot...
.
In 1992, Gallimard and Einaudi
Einaudi
Einaudi may refer to;*Giulio Einaudi , an Italian publisher**Giulio Einaudi editore, now an imprint of Arnoldo Mondadori Editore*Luigi Einaudi , an Italian politician*His son Mario Einaudi , an Italian political scientist...
began a similar series of literature in Italian, the Biblioteca della Pleiade.
The Library of America
Library of America
The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
series, launched in 1979, is a similar project in the United States inspired by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.