Le surmâle: Roman moderne (Superman: A Modern Novel)

In his last novel, playwright Alfred Jarry drew from psychoanalysis to tell the story of Andre Marcueil, who underestimates the effect his actions have on others. The intersection of man’s logic and machine automatism is a central theme; the story begins with a five-person bicycle race against a train, and concludes with Marcueil’s death from an electric chair nicknamed “the love machine.”

Mary Reynolds created this binding for Jarry’s novel after the conclusion of World War II, upon her return to Paris from the safety of New York City. One of her more experimental designs, the cover is a plush, black goatskin accented with two leather “wings,” onlayed to the base of the spine. Anchored in this winged base is a metal corset stay—a metal support that creates a corset’s structure—that protrudes from the book's surface with the tensile force of a spring.

In Jarry’s novel, the main character’s physical interactions with women are a central point of conflict. Marcueil consistently misattributes lust with love, which results in a woman’s death. At once fragile yet potentially sharp, the loose corset stay complicates a reader’s handling of the book. Freed from its garment, it stands erect against the gold-stamped title on the spine, unfurling like a proboscis of a butterfly, or perhaps is a reference to the myth of Icarus, the impetuous young man who flew too close to the sun.