[Entirely unopened copy] Aragon, Louis. Hugo, poete realiste. Collection Problemes. Paris : Editions Sociales, 1952. In French.

Aragon, Louis (1897-1982). Hugo, poete realiste. Collection Problemes.
Paris : Editions Sociales, 1952. 62 pages.
Premiere edition sur papier courant. Couverture souple imprimee en vert et noir.
Exemplaire entierement non coupe : tous les cahiers restent joints au pli d'origine. De petits accrocs sont visibles aux premiers feuillets, la ou quelqu'un a apparemment tente d'ouvrir le livre a la main sans savoir qu'il etait entierement non coupe. 
Couverture bonne : legeres salissures et pliures, dos solide. Bloc-texte tres bon : papier propre, complet, integralement non coupe a l'exception des petits accrocs mentionnes en tete de volume.
 ***
Aragon, Louis (1897-1982). Hugo, the Realist Poet. Problemes series.
Paris : Editions Sociales, 1952. 62 pp.
First edition, ordinary paper. Printed paper wrappers in green and black.
A completely unopened copy: every gathering remains joined at its original fold. Small tears are visible at the first few leaves, where someone evidently attempted to open the book by hand without realizing it was entirely unopened. 
Wrappers good: light soiling and creasing, spine sound. Text block very good: clean and complete, entirely unopened apart from the small tears noted at the front of the volume.

A short but significant piece of Aragon's postwar critical prose, written for the sesquicentennial of Victor Hugo's birth in 1952 as part of the French Communist Party's broader campaign to reclaim Hugo as a precursor of realist and socially engaged literature, against readings of him as a purely Romantic figure. Issued in the "Problemes" series of Editions Sociales, the Party's own publishing house, alongside companion pamphlets by Marcel Cachin, Georges Politzer, Elsa Triolet and Roger Vailland advertised on the rear wrapper, the essay belongs to the same cultural apparatus that produced Aragon's parallel writings on socialist realism in this period. The text was later absorbed into Aragon's collected critical writings, appearing in the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade edition of his Oeuvres critiques, which confirms its place as a recognized and still-read part of his critical corpus rather than a piece of purely occasional journalism. As an inexpensive, unbound pamphlet intended for wide circulation among Party readers, the format was rarely preserved with any care, and copies that survive entirely unopened, their folded sheets never slit for reading, are correspondingly scarce against the well-thumbed copies that dominate the secondhand market.