The illustrated front cover (Congopage.com website)
Top and bottom, you can easily recognize the two last French definitive series : two red non-value-indicated Marianne du 14 juillet in their adhesive form (watch for the lateral ondulating separations), and one Marianne des Français green (non-prioritary letter).
Full center, an United States stamp about the book's matter : writer James Baldwin (1924-1987). Thomas Blackshear II portrayed him from a 1960's picture. The background adapted a Berenice Abbot's 1938 photograph taken in Harlem, where Baldwin is born. The enveloppe on which the stamp (without cancellation...) is sticked wears the name of a French town : Saint-Paul-de-Vence, near Nice, where the writer dies.
Blackshear is known for his statues inspiring by christian faith and black-american culture, and many stamps for the USPS too. Berenice Abbot is linked to the Lost Generation, these writers and artists who emigrated from the US and came to Paris after World War One.
I admit that my lack of culture (or my hyper-contemporary culture) makes me discover James Baldwin this morning, but I congratulate the marketing service of Fayard editions for doing such a catching philatelic cover.
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