In 1980 an exhibition of the "Illuminated Manuscripts" of Rene Char held in Paris took the artistic and literary worlds by surprise. It featured illustrations by twenty-eight artists of an array of Char's hand-written poems. Char's artistic associations, spanning seven decades, remain remarkable today. Not only was he amply illustrated by those he called his "substantial allies"; the dedicatory poems and prose pieces they inspired, written with revelatory flair, constitute a unique corpus in the history of art and poetic enterprise.This book brings together an exemplary number of the artists...