Saint Jacob

Les Hautes-Plaines de Mane: Robert Morel, 1968. Collection Blanche. First Robert Morel edition. Square 8vo (24 × 19 cm). Two volumes assembled tête-bêche in the publisher’s white board jumelée binding. Accordion-fold construction; 450 pp. Illustrated with four previously unpublished black-and-white photographs by Agnès Varda. Text in French. Contents clean and unmarked. Fine copy

First published in Paris in 1954, Jean Cabriès’ Saint Jacob (a pseudonym of Jean Monnier) revisits the Genesis story not as sacred spectacle but as intimate drama.

In 1968, Robert Morel republished the text at Les Hautes-Plaines de Mane as part of his legendary Collection Blanche, a series that treats the book as a designed object rather than a neutral container. This edition is constructed as a physical reading experience. It opens in an accordion fold, and its two parts are arranged tête-bêche, so the volume must be rotated to be read in full. Pagination begins on the cover itself, collapsing the usual thresholds between exterior and interior, title page and first sentence.

The design is credited to Odette Ducarre, a key presence in Morel’s atelier-like approach to publishing. The volume includes four previously unpublished photographs by Agnès Varda. They appear without fanfare, more as discreet interruptions than as illustrations, adding a photographic undertone to a narrative already haunted by vision, blindness, recognition, and misrecognition.

The result is a rare convergence: a mid-century biblical novel reframed through Morel’s radical bookmaking, with Varda’s images threaded quietly into the margins.