Lettered B and the only one of these special copies to feature in auction records, it is inscribed by the illustrator, à Sartre amicalement WOLS to the title-page and was last offered at auction in 1985, when in a Dörling of Hamburg sale it made 15,500 Deutschmarks, then about £7000.
Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, or WOLS, was a German painter (1913-51) who, according to the OUP Dictionary of Modern & Contemporary Art, was broadly unrecognised in his lifetime but is now considered a pioneer of ‘Lyrical Abstraction’ and one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement.