The Album de la Pléiade is a book published every year in May by the "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade", a series of classic French and international texts by French publishing house éditions Gallimard. It is usually about an author published in the series, although occasionally about a collective from a specific time period (1961 recording and 1989 album) or an important topic of the collection (1970 and 2009 albums).
Featured authors are generally chosen upon their entry in the series or a major addition of their works.
Each album is richly illustrated and focuses on iconography, with an accompanying bibliographical text by a renowned specialist of the selected author. It is produced in the same format, leather-bound cover and gold lettering as volumes of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, but has generally fewer pages and is printed on thicker paper to allow the inclusion of many colour images.
The Albums are not for sale. They are offered by the booksellers to customers who purchase three books from the collection. They tend to be distributed very quickly and immediately become collector's items. Because of this, the most popular books of the collection such as, among others, Album Proust (1965), Album Céline (1977) or Album Balzac (1962) can only be obtained on reselling markets at high prices (often found around $200–$300). The older (1960s-1970s) books are also often high priced due to their rarity, even if the author is less popular. The oldest, Dictionnaire des auteurs de la Pléiade (Dictionary of the Authors of the Pléiade), published in 1960 has always been the most expensive, selling for over $400–$450.
List of the albums
1960: Dictionnaire des auteurs de la Pléiade, a dictionary considered as the forerunner to the albums. 1961: Poètes du XVIe siècle, an LP record of poems by 16th-century poets read by renowned actors such as María Casares, with an appended booklet in Pléiade format containing all featured poems. 1962: Honoré de BalzacAlthough the 1960 dictionary and the 1961 record and booklet are forerunners, the series was formally started only in 1962, the Balzac album being counted as No. 1 by Gallimard. 1963: Émile Zola 1964: Victor Hugo 1965: Marcel Proust 1966: Stendhal 1967: Arthur Rimbaud 1968: Paul Éluard 1969: Saint-Simon 1970: Classical theater 1971: Guillaume Apollinaire 1972: Gustave Flaubert (1st) 1973: George Sand 1974: Charles Baudelaire (1st) 1975: Fyodor Dostoevsky 1976: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1977: Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1st) 1978: Blaise Pascal 1979: Henry de Montherlant 1980: Jean Giono 1981: Paul Verlaine 1982: Albert Camus 1983: Voltaire 1984: Colette 1985: André Gide 1986: André Malraux 1987: Guy de Maupassant 1988: François-René de Chateaubriand 1989: “The Writers of the French Revolution” 1990: Lewis Carroll 1991: Jean-Paul Sartre 1992: Jacques Prévert 1993: Gérard de Nerval 1994: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 1995: William Faulkner 1996: Oscar Wilde 1997: Louis Aragon 1998: Julien Green 1999: Jorge Luis Borges 2000: the NRF 2001: Marcel Aymé 2002: Raymond Queneau 2003: Georges Simenon 2004: Denis Diderot 2005: One Thousand and One Nights 2006: Jean Cocteau 2007: Michel de Montaigne 2008: André Breton 2009: the Holy Grail 2010: Molière 2011: Paul Claudel 2012: Jules Verne 2013: Blaise Cendrars 2014: Marguerite Duras 2015: Giacomo Casanova 2016: William Shakespeare 2017: Georges Perec 2018: Simone de Beauvoir 2019: Romain Gary 2020: Joseph Kessel 2021: Gustave Flaubert (2nd) 2022: Franz Kafka 2023: Louis-Ferdinand Céline (2nd) 2024: Charles Baudelaire (2nd) 2025: Sherlock Holmes
Notes and references