One of 26 special lettered copies (from a run of 450) of a 1949 Paris edition of Nourritures suivi d’extraits de la Nausée by Jean Paul Sartre sold by a Venator & Hanstein for €29,000 (£25,085.
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.
