Paris: Edward W. Titus, 1932

8vo, pp. 208, 4pp. advertisments bound in at rear. Printed stiff paper wrappers. Lacking the scarce original glassine sleeve. Contemporary ownership inscription ('Margueritte Donne Paris 1932') to first leaf, oversize wrappers chipped and worn with loss to corners of front wrapper and spine, small white paint splash (!) to front wrapper, which is almost detached.

First edition of the scarce Surrealist Number of the (mostly) Parisian modernist magazine, This Quarter. Guest edited by André Breton, who contributes a long introductory essay rendered into English by the publisher Edward Titus.

This Quarterwas founded in 1925 by the American expatriate poet Ernest Walsh [1895-1926] and the English suffragette Ethel Moorhead [1869-1955]. Only two issues of the quarterly had been published when Walsh died of consumption at the age of thirty-one, and after a period of turbulence and only sporadic publication, This Quarter was taken over by Edward Titus of the Black Manikin Press, a highbrow expatriate imprint based in Paris. Under Titus's stewardship the magazine was more professionally run but less adventurously edited. It ceased production in 1932 after a run of just eighteen issues, having published work by most of the leading Paris expatriates of the day, as well as many little-known writers -- Ernest Hemingway and William Carlos Williams among them -- who were about to become very well-known indeed.

Written contributions to this issue come from Salvador Dali, Paul Eluard, René Char, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, Tristan Rzara and René Crevel, and the issue is not short of illustrators.