Alain Gheerbrant was the first
avant-garde publisher, founder of the publishing house K Éditeur, which published works by
Antonin Artaud,
Benjamin Péret,
Georges Bataille, and
Aimé Césaire. For the second edition of
Story of the Eye by Bataille, Gheerbrant introduced Bataille to the German artist
Hans Bellmer in May 1946: "It was tempting," says Gheerbrant, "to create a dialogue between a
papist and a
Lutheran on their common obsession. One's Nordic and surgical precision was made to give shape to the nocturnal and romantic imaginations of the other. The project took their common approval from the outset." The book was entirely rewritten by Bataille himself. From 1948 to 1950, Alain Gheerbrant led the
Orinoco-
Amazon expedition. He travelled through the basins of both rivers for two years and wrote of his travels in (The Orinoco-Amazon Expedition) (1952). He is considered the first Westerner to make peaceful contact with the
Yanomami Indians and also the first to cross the
Parima Mountains as he did between 1948 and 1950. In 1952, he directed a documentary film called .(Men We Call Savages) He produced numerous articles from all over the world and published (Dictionary of Symbols)in 1982, a collaborative work with
Jean Chevalier, an encyclopaedia of cultural anthropology about the symbolism of myths and folklore, which was republished nineteen times between 1982 and 1997. He authored an illustrated
pocket book for the "
Découvertes Gallimard"
collection, titled (The Amazon, A Wounded Giant) (1988), which has been translated into eleven languages including English. In 1995, he released his memoir entitled (The Transverse). == Selected bibliography ==