Gallimard: 100 years in publishing

Once upon a time – or rather, il était une fois – there was a young man of good family, son of a rich amateur art collector, vaguely in search of employment. His father had suggested he take a sinecure in a rural government department, but the young man answered that he would prefer to do nothing, to become a flâneur of Norman countryside and Parisian boulevard. The young man's name was Gaston Gallimard. As fate would have it, close by the family home in Normandy lay the Château de Cuverville, at the heart of which lurked the sulphurous André Gide. Along with some literary friends, Gide was set on founding a literary magazine and a publishing house. Although he and his friends saw in young Gaston a "good match" – the boy had wealth and breeding, taste and contacts – no one quite could have predicted that this dreamy young man would become one of the most famous and successful literary publishers anywhere.

Gaston himself always protested that he had never had any ambition or even vocation to be a publisher. And when in 1910 he was invited to join the "adventure" of the Nouvelle revue française (Nrf), it was an example of what became a rule, letting his friends "guide his life". Modest, somewhat detached, well turned-out and above all, perhaps, "without side", he was to prove a magnet for writers of violently contrasting aesthetic and political allegiances. He had charm, and he had luck. He drew towards him, and elected to that most exalted of circles, the comité de lecture, such arbiters of literary taste and intellectual vigour as Jacques Rivière, Jean Paulhan, André Malraux, Albert Camus and Raymond Queneau.

The exhibition currently on show in Paris, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, celebrating the centenary of the Gallimard publishing house, puts on public show the gems of its archive. Gaston Gallimard and his colleagues were also astute: aware that an archive of such richness would go on acquiring value, early on they invited their authors to contribute to it. There is a note from Jean Paulhan on show, kindly requesting authors to "throw away nothing, tear nothing up, burn nothing". Instead they were to send manuscripts, diaries, letters, essays and poetic juvenilia to the rue Sébastien-Bottin, the elegant hôtel particulier in the seventh arrondissement where Gallimard settled his rapidly growing enterprise in 1929, and where it remains today.

In 1930, Henri Manuel was commissioned to photograph the new quarters: they are austere but chic, and there is a picture of the "authors' room", which, as Gallimard proudly explained to Valery Larbaud, "will be equipped with writing tables, telephones, good armchairs, a bar and a view of the garden". He was as good as his word and, in the images of the comité de lecture in the early years at least, the likes of Camus, Queneau and Paulhan are sunk deep in the brown leather of the fauteuils club. Roger Martin du Gard, whose handwritten plan for his huge family chronicle Les Thibault, looking like a very long menu card, is on show, captured the essence of the place, writing to Gaston in 1939: "it is a kind of family . . . where the bosses are called by their first names; a rather fantastical gathering of cultivated souls." Physical comfort was merely an extension of the moral comfort lavished on authors, once they had been admitted to the august imprint.




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