First edition, English-language issue. The Greek publisher and critic Tériade (1897-1983) emigrated to Paris when he was 18 and, after working for the publishers Cahiers d’art and Skira, he founded the periodical Verve in 1937. His publishing experience and contacts enabled him to attract a remarkable group of writers, artists, photographers, and others to contribute to Verve, as can be seen in this – the second issue – which includes texts by André Gide, James Joyce (‘A Phoenix Park Nocturne’, the final periodical appearance of an extract from Finnegans Wake to appear before the book’s publication in 1939), Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux, and Paul Valéry; original lithographs by Wassily Kandinski and André Masson; and photographs by Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Willy Maywald. Verve was issued in both French and English-language editions (in this issue the French texts were translated by Robert Sage, Dorothy Bussy, Stuart Gilbert, et al.), and it was distributed in Great Britain by the bookseller, art dealer, and publisher A. Zwemmer. ¶¶

This copy is from the library of John Maynard Keynes and his wife, the Anglo-Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, and it seems likely that it would have been of interest to them due to the contributions by and about the artist Georges Braque (1882-1963) which form much of the content of this issue. The cover design is by Braque, the issue opens with a piece written by Braque (‘Reflections’, p. 7), which is illustrated with an image of a bas-relief by the artist; three paintings by Braque – ‘Woman with a Mandolin’, ‘The Beach’, and ‘Still-Life’ – are reproduced as colour illustrations; and photographic portraits of Braque by Bill Brandt and Elliott, together with a view of Braque’s studio by Brandt, are illustrated. ¶¶

Keynes appears to have first met Braque in the spring of 1920, when he, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant (who were returning from a holiday in Italy) visited ‘Picasso and Braque, some of whose paintings Vanessa tried (without success, at least initially [...]) to persuade Keynes to buy after they returned to London’ (D.E. Moggridge, Maynard Keynes: An Economist’s Biography (London and New York, 1992), p. 361). Keynes would buy his first piece by Braque in c. 1922-1923 (‘Cubist Design’ painted in 1911), and some years later he purchased Braque’s ‘Reclining Nude’ (1925) in 1937 – less than a year before this issue of Verve was published. ¶¶

Keynes’s wife Lydia Lopokova – whom he had first met in 1918 and fallen in love with in late 1921 – probably first met Braque in Paris in 1924, when she was part of the company for Les Soirées de Paris. Les Soirées de Paris was a season of eight ballets which included Salade, with music by Darius Milhaud and designs (both costumes and sets) by Braque. In a letter to Keynes of 15 May 1924, Lopokova wrote ‘[t]he ballet Salade, now I like it is with singing, music is stirring and the décor of Braque very attractive’ (P. Hill and R. Keynes (ed.), Lydia and Maynard. Letters between Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes (London, 1989), p. 194). After John Maynard Keynes’s death in 1946, this volume remained at Tilton House, Keynes’s home in Sussex, until the death of his widow, Lydia Lopokova in 1981, when it was included in the list of books removed from Tilton House. The book then passed to John Maynard Keynes’s nephew and godson Stephen Keynes (the son of the bibliographer Sir Geoffrey Keynes), who had, like his uncle, been educated at King’s College, Cambridge. ¶¶

Cf. A. Hanneman, Ernest Hemingway C.279; J.J. Slocum and H. Cahoon, James Joyce, C.93. ¶¶

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