Education
École Nationale des Chartes.
École Nationale des Chartes.
In his short six years of printing and publishing Auguste Poulet-Malassis released very few books, and with little gain financially. The books were always beautifully bound and printed on fine paper with illustrations. Poulet-Malassis printed and published the works of Baudelaire famously, but also printed what would - at the time - have been safer, more acclaimed novelists, poets and critics.
Which included the likes of Théodore Faullain de Banville, Théophile Gautier, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve and Champfleury.
lieutenant sometimes seems as if he had printed his friends works - through acts of kindheartedness or even sympathy - when they had nowhere else to turn. This may have been the case with Baudelaire who struggled to make a living almost all of his adult life.
Together with Baudelaire they worked themselves further and further into debt until Poulet-Malassis was imprisoned for unpaid debts in November 1862. This debt would have been no problem, if it were not for the scarcity of sales, probably due to little or no advertising.
lieutenant could not have helped being involved with the scandal and outrage which Les Fleurs du mal generated.
He printed the first number of editions and the book of Baudelaire"s poems was subsequently banned - after a pigheaded and uncharitable court case - for obscenities. Also, at the instigation of Baudelaire, the company opened a ground floor shop in the centre of Paris, in the Passage Mires. The shop was laid out beautifully with oak shelves, no expense was spared but Poulet-Malassis seemed to have treated the building as a literary club house where he would talk with his friends for hours on education
He never was famous for his business sense, the shop never did make a profit and was just another negative in the buildup to his downfall.