The Road Is Wider Than Long. An Image Diary from the Balkans July-August 1938 [inscribed to Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington]

London: London Gallery Editions, 1939. First edition. Publisher's wood-grain boards, lettered on the front board and spine (design by Hans Bellmer). Photographic endpapers. Photomontage frontispiece; 37 black and white photographs and a drawing, text in black and red. Some minor foxing to boards, slight chipping to head of spine.

One of 500 numbered copies, this is number 132 (H.C.). Originally created as a unique visual diary dedicated by Penrose to Lee Miller as a souvenir of their travels through the Balkans in 1938. The following year, Penrose created this edition: "I amused myself further by finding a friendly printer who happily put at my disposal his entire stock of type which I used freely in unconventional lay-outs to emphasise what I had to say." In his afterword to the Getty facsimile published in 2003, curator Weston Naef said of it, "the 1939 edition of The Road Is Wider Than Long occupies an unheralded place in the history of early modern artists' books. It is one of the few books by a Surrealist artist to have been illustrated with photographs. It is also one of the first artists' books to use the new and inexpensive method of offset lithography printed on ordinary commercial printing paper rather than traditional lithography printed on expensive handmade paper and issued in a very limited edition."

Roland Penrose was the primary carrier of surrealism from France to England. He organized the International Exhibition of Surrealism in London in 1936, and a solo show of Max Ernst's in London in 1937. Leonora Carrington saw this show and was immediately captivated; "I fell in love with Max's paintings before I fell in love with Max." She met him at a dinner party soon afterwards, and their amour fou began immediately. Max and Leonora remained close to Penrose and his partner (later wife) Lee Miller, both of whom visited them when they lived in Saint-Martin d'Ardèche in the south of France before the war disrupted their bliss.

This copy is inscribed to Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst, with a drawing of an eye within a heart and a warm dedication to his longtime friend and mentor Ernst, "qui a eté la boussole vertical de ma route depuis LONGTEMPS." Although the inscription is undated, the book must have been given to Max and Leonora in 1939, the year of publication, the year in which their idyllic existence in southern France was destroyed. Penrose and Miller's journey through the Balkans was similarly overshadowed by impending war; an evocative and poignant object.