Black Sun Press (19 Rue de Lille)

The press

Rue de Lille runs parallel to the Seine behind the Musée d'Orsay, a quiet street of eighteenth-century town houses in what was once the grandest residential quarter in France. The Crosbys took No. 19 and put a press in it.

They had no need of the income and no interest in volume. The Black Sun printed short runs on good paper with the typography got exactly right, and priced accordingly. What makes the list remarkable is not the production but the judgment: Joyce, Hart Crane, Kay Boyle, Hemingway and Lawrence, published in several cases before the wider world had settled on them.

For Lawrence they printed the story "Sun" and then The Escaped Cock, his novella about a man who comes out of a tomb and decides not to resume being a god. It is a strange, late, physical book, and the Black Sun was exactly the kind of press that could publish it without argument.

Lawrence, and the introduction that failed

Lawrence spent March and part of April 1929 in Paris arranging the cheap edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover. He saw the Crosbys in both their houses, here and at the mill at Ermenonville where the Lawrences spent the Easter weekend.

Caresse Crosby thought Lawrence and Joyce should meet. The two men were the most argued-about novelists writing in English, both published by small Paris presses because the trade would not have them, and both in the city at the same time. Joyce muttered something about his eye playing up and made an exit. Nothing came of it, then or later.

Harry Crosby died on 10 December 1929, eight months after the Easter weekend. He was found in a friend's studio at the Hotel des Artistes in New York, on a bed beside Josephine Rotch Bigelow, a married woman he had been involved with since meeting her in Venice. Both had a bullet in the temple from the same .25 calibre pistol. The coroner put her death about two hours before his. There was no note, and the papers spent days arguing over whether it was a pact she had agreed to or a killing she had not. Lawrence, who was holding onto his own life with both hands by then, was censorious about it. He had fifteen months left.

Visiting today

• Address: 19 rue de Lille, 7th arrondissement
• Métro: Rue du Bac, or Solférino for the Musée d'Orsay end
• A private address with no marker and no public access; this is a street to walk, not a building to enter
• The Musée d'Orsay is three minutes away, which is the practical reason to be in the street at all
• Worth the trip? Only if you are already in Saint-Germain. Nothing of the press is visible from the street

Last verified: August 2026.