2007 80pp Atlas Press tall paperback in card slipcase. Illustrated by Andre Masson. NM.
 
Michel Leiris (1901-1990) was a poet, novelist, and ethnographer. After leaving the Surrealist group, he was associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Georges Bataille. It was with the latter, and with the artists André Masson and Pablo Picasso, that Leiris acquired his enthusiasm for the bullfight.
 
Mirror of Tauromachy is his summation of this life-long passion.
He considers the bullfight in all its mythological and sociological significances, as a form of sacrifice and sacred ceremony, as a means of directly immersing oneself in a world of tragedy, and as an initiation in which the bullfight is the erotic mirror that reveals “certain dark parts of ourselves”. 
 
This was the only book to be published by Georges Bataille’s Acéphale group.