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Cover of Bantam’s paperback edition The Thief’s Journal, published in 1965 with a foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre and advertised as “the only complete and authorized edition of the uncensored Grove Press bestseller” which was translated from the French by Bernard Frechtman.
The text on the left is set in various sizes of Inserat-Grotesk a.k.a. Neue Aurora VIII, (sloppily) stacked and justified. The smaller text on the top right uses caps from the equally narrow News Gothic Extra Condensed, set center-aligned in an ellipse.
The Thief’s Journal (Journal du voleur, published in 1949) is a novel by Jean Genet. Although autobiographical to some degree, Genet’s exploitation of poetic language results in an ambiguity throughout the text. Superficially, the novel follows the author’s progress though 1930s Europe, wearing little and enduring hunger, contempt, and fatigue: “the life of the vermin”. The protagonist is “hot for crime” and romanticizes criminality as well as homosexuality, two facets of his identity that keep him ostracized from the general public.