Paul Emmanuel Auguste Poulet-Malassis (March 16, 1825 – February 11, 1878) was a French printer

Printer (publisher)

In publishing, printers are both companies providing printing services and individuals who directly operate printing presses. With the invention of the moveable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450, printing—and printers—proliferated throughout Europe.Today, printers are found...

 and publisher who lived and worked in Paris. He was also a long standing friend and the printer/publisher of Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...

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Biography

In his short six years of printing

Printing

Printing is a process for reproducing text and image, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. It is often carried out as a large-scale industrial process, and is an essential part of publishing and transaction printing....

 and publishing

Publishing

Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information—the activity of making information available to the general public...

 Auguste Poulet-Malassis released very few books, with little gain financially. He seemed to have been more concerned with the aesthetics and the appeal to his close friends than - much to the despair of his partner and brother in law De Broise- the actual profits and finance. The books were always bound beautifully and printed on fine paper with illustrations.

Poulet Malassis printed and published the works of Baudelaire famously, but also printed what would - at the time - have been safer, more acclaimed novelists, poets and critics. Which included the likes of Théodore Faullain de Banville, Théophile Gautier

Théophile Gautier

Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....

, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was a literary critic and one of the major figures of French literary history.-Early years:...

 and Champfleury

Champfleury

Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson , who wrote under the name Champfleury, was a French art critic and novelist, a prominent supporter of the Realist movement in painting and fiction.In 1843 Fleury-Husson moved to Paris...

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It sometimes seems as if he had printed his friends works - through acts of kindheartedness or even sympathy - when they had nowhere else to turn; this may have been the case with Baudelaire who struggled to make a living almost all of his adult life.
Together with Baudelaire they worked themselves further and further into debt until Poulet-Malassis was imprisoned for unpaid debts in November 1862; This debt would have been no problem, if it were not for the scarcity of sales, probably due to little or no advertising. It could not have helped being involved with the scandal and outrage which Les Fleurs Du Mal

Les Fleurs du mal

Les Fleurs du mal is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857 , it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements...

 generated. He printed the first number of editions and the book of Baudelaire's poems was subsequently banned - after a pigheaded and uncharitable court case - for obscenities.

Also, at the instigation of Baudelaire, the company opened a ground floor shop in the centre of Paris, in the Passage Mires. The shop was laid out beautifully with oak shelves, no expense was spared but Poulet Malassis seemed to have treated the building as a literary club house where he would talk with his friends for hours on end. He never was famous for his business sense, the shop never did make a profit and was just another negative in the build up to his downfall.