L’An 2000 : une anti-histoire de la fin du monde

Paris: Éditions Gallimard/Julliard, 1975. Collection Archives no. 60. First edition. 12mo (18x11cm), printed card wrappers. 225pp. Text in French. Cover design and photographs by Chris Marker. Mild edge wear and light toning to wrappers with some soiling and creasing to rear cover. Moderate foxing to flyleaf and slight foxing to the first 3 pages, else a very good copy.

L’An 2000 : une anti-histoire de la fin du monde by André Clément Decouflé was published twenty-five years before the year 2000. With the new millennial approaching the world was forced to think about it’s future. At the time L’An 2000 was published in 1975, André Clément Decouflé was the director of the Laboratoire de Prospective Appliquée in Paris, whose research focused on social foresight, which aims to prepare the future through a rational and holistic approach. L’An 2000 brings together a really astonishing collection of literature dealing with the prediction of the future.

Most of the books in the collection were written in the middle of the 20th Century and offer at the same time a great insight of this era itself. The list of references is long and includes books, like the influential environmentalist text A Blueprint for Survival; Frank Herbert’s Dune; The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years by the military strategist Herman Kahn, who was the inspiration to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

All images in this book were assembled by Chris Marker and taken from his personal archive, Marker was also responsible for the cover design.