Why Paul Bonet was the Surrealists’ favourite bookbinder

In 1928, the poet René Char walked into a little bookbinding studio in Paris with a copy of Nadja, André Breton’s hallucinatory account of his infatuation with a vulnerable young woman who eventually goes insane. Char wanted it bound, and turned to Paul Bonet, one of the few designers he believed able to grasp the revolutionary tenets of Surrealism.

Binding, said Bonet, is ‘une création plastique’. He understood that to the protagonists of this radical new movement, art and literature were one and the same, united in a desire to restore the marvellous to a world dominated by the rationality of modernity. To travel with the Surrealists required an elasticity of magical thinking, something Bonet proved himself more than capable of.

The bookbinder had the measure of Breton’s ego, too: the cover he designed for Nadja features cut-out portraits of the self-styled leader of Surrealism gazing at the distant cosmos, while the hapless Nadja is etherealised into a gold-tooled heart hovering over the poet’s forehead.

‘It was truly a star, a star towards which you were going,’ says Nadja forlornly. ‘You could not fail to arrive at this star. To hear you speak, I felt that nothing would prevent you: nothing, not even me…’

Char’s copy of Nadja, Breton’s most widely read book, is offered in Cabinet des livres de Pierre Brossette in Paris on 22 May 2025. In the video above, the collection is described by Adrien Legendre, director of Books & Manuscripts in Paris, as comprising ‘some of the best copies available from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries: literature, travel books and artist books, as well as artistic bindings’. Among the stunning examples of French literature on offer are 20 books bound by Bonet.

Born in 1889 to Belgian parents in Paris, Bonet had hoped to become an artist, but was instead apprenticed to an electrician. Having been wounded in the First World War, he began binding books as a hobby, but was persuaded to take up the profession following a successful exhibition of his designs at the Palais Galliera in 1924.

Into this relatively refined Parisian world stormed the avant-gardists in search of a fellow conspirator. Bonet — young, enthusiastic, and with his own sense of the miraculous — fitted the bill, and he was soon working on books by Picasso and Max Jacob, Matisse and André Gide. Keen to embrace the new, he combined Cubist, Fauvist and Surrealist influences. When he was presented with a copy of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Alcools, he took Picasso’s famous Cubist portrait of the poet and adapted it into a witty design that celebrated Apollinaire’s distinctive features.

Bonet had a habit of using unorthodox materials, in keeping with the Surrealists’ rebel sensibilities. In one version of Paul Eluard’s Facile, a collection of love poems to his wife Nusch, he overlaid a pair of Nusch’s kid gloves on the cover — it sold for €823,500 at Christie’s in Paris in 2017.

Other materials, such as wood, eggshell, ivory and nickel, were sculpted, moulded and cut into an endless variety of forms. Bonet’s binding for a copy of Breton and Eluard’s L’Immaculée conception from 1930, which (among other things) expounded the liberating potential of madness and magic, features a pair of photographed hands clutching at stars floating in a deep-blue plasma.

‘He truly is a one-off. His designs are strikingly original,’ says Legendre. ‘What made him special was his ability to adapt to the artist or writer he was working with at the time.’

The publisher Georges Blaizot recalled how Bonet would treat every commission differently, regardless of whether he had bound the book many times before: ‘For Picasso and Apollinaire, he dreamed. For the Surrealists, he gave himself free rein and conjured up internal visions. For Dufy, he smiles and sings softly to himself.’

By the 1940s, however, it was for his ‘irradiant’ covers that he was most sought after. These dazzling forerunners of the Op Art style, pulsing like solar waves, were created by meticulously layering gold-tooled lines into orbs and sunbursts. ‘They are absolutely stunning,’ says Legendre, ‘and to my mind embody that Surrealist desire to leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.’

Long before Victor Vasarely or Bridget Riley began painting their disorientating visions, Bonet was pioneering this futuristic style. Today he may be little known outside the bookbinding world, but his covers have inspired countless graphic artists, particularly in the realm of science fiction.

‘He showed his contemporaries how to take risks,’ says Legendre. ‘He was always uncompromising. Each book is a thing of beauty.’

Offered on 22 May 2025, Cabinet des livres de Pierre Brossette is on view at Christie’s in Paris until 21 May