Pierre Berès

He was described as "the king of booksellers" in his New York Times obituary and as "a legendary figure in the world of art, collecting and publishing" by French culture minister Christine Albanel.

[1] Born in Stockholm, Sweden with the surname Berestovski or Berestov according to different sources, he grew up in Paris and attended Lycée Louis-le-Grand.

He opened a New York branch of his bookstore in 1937, and his Paris shop weathered World War II.

Rare finds included the manuscript of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit and Arthur Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer inscribed by the author to Paul Verlaine.

[1] In 2005, he closed his bookstore in Paris and sold his collection of 12,000 books, which earned over 35 million euros in a series of auctions.