We are facing a set of works by Salvador Dali (1904-1989), his series of prints, graph-ic plates, and spatial objects, a rare assemblage of items, the quintessence of a phenomenon called le livre d'artiste in the 20th century. Perhaps first used by Ambroise Vollard, the well-known French marchand and patron of art, to describe the Parallelement series of lithographs commissioned from Pierre Bonnard as the latter's authorial cycle of illustrations to Paul Verlaine's poetry the concept was to become one of the more important 20th-century artistic categories. The artist's book is a term applied to works executed on the basis of the artist's origi-nal self-made plates or matrices (stone ones as in lithography, wooden as in woodcut, metal as, e.g.,in etching or dry-point, and in all combinations of natural and artificial materials), impressed from to provide illustrations for literary works.

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