ZOLA (Émile). La Bête humaine. Paris: A. & G. Mornay, 1924. - In-8, 198 x 149: frontispiece, (2 ff.), 460 pp., (2 ff.). Dark green half-maroquin with rectangular corners in the same morocco, horizontal bands in blue and red morocco on the boards and continuous on the spine, smooth spine decorated with the author's name and title in gilt capital letters distributed on the bands overhanging the boards, gilt head, untrimmed, cover and spine preserved (Paul Bonet). Fine edition illustrated with a two-tone frontispiece and numerous black and two-tone compositions in the text, wood-engraved by the painter and illustrator Géo DUPUIS (1874-1932), pseudonym of Georges Gustave Léon Dupuis. Numbered copy on Rives paper (no. 918). Interesting and rare early binding by Paul Bonet (1889-1971), in an art-deco style corresponding to his definition of binding: "The decoration of a binding must be a decorative synthesis of the book, standing on the borderline between the abstract and the concrete, taking from the former what is highly spiritual, but tempering it with concreteness, in order to avoid the impersonal; ensuring that a binding attempts to express the soul of the book without falling into a vulgar picturesqueness, in concordance with the new pictorial trends" (Henri Clouzot, Paul Bonet, architecte de la reliure, in Mobilier et décoration : revue française des arts décoratifs appliqués, Éditions Edmond Honoré, January 1933, pp. 66-72). Although he began bookbinding on his return from the war in 1920, Paul Bonet didn't make it his profession until 1924. This book was produced around that time, at any rate before 1930. Spine faded.