Gérard Oberlé


Gérard Oberlé is a French writer and bibliographer.

Origin and biography

Born in Alsace, of parents from Lorraine originating from Dabo where his grandfather was a clog maker, Gérard Oberlé spent there his summers. An adolescent in Switzerland by the Jesuits at Fribourg, then a student in classical literature in Strasbourg and The Sorbonne, he became an auxiliary master of Latin and ancient Greek in Metz, but must quickly leave teaching.

Ancient books

In 1967–1968, he became a bookseller of used books, after reading a small advertisement. In 1971 he opened his own shop. He has lived since 1976 in a manor house of Nivernais where he has published various specialized catalogs on peddler literature, roman noir, literary cranks, or else neo-Latin poetry in Europe from the XVIth to the XIXe.
He is an expert at the Court of Appeal of Bourges, an expert approved by the National Company of Experts. Passionate about humanism and scholarship, he has, in his researches and works, given priority to works ignored by the culture officially taught : The baroque poets, the bizarre, paraliterature, the little romantics, and so on. He has reprinted the Légendes et chants de gestes canaques by Louise Michel, as well as various other forgotten works. As an editor, he published collections by,, Jean-Claude Carrière, John Roman Baker|, Jean-Pierre Luminet and Jules Roy.

Literature and bibliography

In 1989, the Éditions Belfond published his Les Fastes de Bacchus et de Comus, a bibliographic catalog of an important collection of gastronomy books. In 1992, he wrote the catalog Kilian Fritsch, a book collector on wine and oenology, whose library was scattered during a sale organized by Guy Loudmer in 1993.
In 2000, he became a writer, his first novel was a detective one. He is also a chronicler at France Musique. in the américan magazine Men's Journal and Lire and since 2012 at Lire He has a correspondence with Jim Harrison which partly appeared in Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand in 2001.

Publications