Books: Midnight Editions

Even book-publishing went on in the French underground. Last week French booklovers were scouring their country for copies of 20 small, paper-covered volumes that are already collectors’ items.

Anti-Nazi poems, novels, essays and political reports, mostly written by Frenchmen under pseudonyms and collectively known as Les Editions de Minuit (Midnight Editions), they had been published under the noses of Vichy and Nazi authorities for more than two years. Now the authors’ real names were revealed.

They included some of France’s most famous writers : Poet Louis Aragon (“François la Colère”) ; François Mauriac (“Forez”) ; Livération Editor Claude Morgan (“Mortagne”); Poet Jean Cassou (“Jean Noir”), and (anonymously) Roger Giron, Chief of Cabinet in Premier Reynaud’s last Government. Reprinted for Les Editions from smuggled foreign copies were John Steinbeck’s Nuits Noires (The Moon Is Down) and exiled Catholic Philosopher Jacques Maritain’s A Travers le Désastre.

Only 25 Knew. Before the liberation of Paris only 25 people knew the identity of the man chiefly responsible for Les Editions de Minuit. He was shy, thirtyish Jean Bruller, a onetime illustrator whose skittish prewar works included a book of cartoons entitled Twenty-One Delightful Ways of Committing Suicide.

In December 1941 Bruller and vivacious young Yvonne Paraf (who had connections with the underground) started their dangerous career as anti-Nazi publishers.

A Paris doctor donated 5,000 francs and Publisher Bruller bought the necessary paper bit by bit on the black market. Under the pseudonym “Vercors” he also wrote the Editions’ first volume, Le Silence de la Mer (later translated as The Silence of the Sea and published in LIFE Oct. 11, 1943). Working secretly nights and Sundays, Underground Printer Ernest Aulard handset the Editions’ first volumes, later managed to obtain a linotype.

By Hand and Bicycle. Completed pages were delivered to Madame Paraf’s gaily furnished apartment. Here Bruller and Paraf cut and bound the pages by hand. Two trusted girls on bicycles carried copies to noted French writers and critics; other copies were sent boldly through the mails or passed on to resistance groups for distribution. Hundreds of other type written copies were passed from hand to hand throughout France.

The Editions’ 21st volume, a stirring story of an escape from the Nazis, is the first to be published in liberty, the first to omit the defiant inscription of its predecessors: “Ce volume, publié aux dépens de quelques lettrés patriotes, a été achevé d’imprimer sous l’oppression a Paris” (“This book, published with the aid of certain patriots of literature, has been printed under the oppression in Paris”).