Obviously adapted by somebody who studied bookbinding. It's the original Signet 921AB nicely transformed into a red linnen hardcover.
This is a vibrant novel based on the life of the great French painter, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,
whose paintings have immortalized the gaiety, lust and decadence of Paris, but whose own life was a tragic, desperate quest for love.

Crippled and deformed from childhood, scorned by his wealthy, virile father, and sheltered by his adoring mother, Toulouse-Lautrec managed to achieve fame as an artist before he was twenty-five.
But the women he longed for rejected him
-kindly or cruelly, abused his talent and his wealth, or treated him as a funnel into which they poured out their troubles with other men. Only in the squalid parlors of Montmartre’s brothels did he find momen-tary rapture and relief from the besetting obsession of his life. And when he could not find women, he turned to prodigious drinking orgies.

Among the people that crossed his bumpy
path were Cézanne, Gauguin, César Franck and Vincent van Gogh…
The only woman who almost answered his yearnings was the beautiful shopgirl and mannequin Myriame. But in spite of their best intentions they lived an impossible dream.

From the six! ‘Moulin Rouge’ movies made sofar, the 1952 version was directed by John Huston and stars José Ferrer (de Toulouse-Lautrec), Zsa Zsa Gabor (Jane Avril), Katherine Kath (La Goulue),
Suzanne Flon, Eric Pohlmann, Colette Marchand, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Theodore Bikel and Muriel Smith.

It is said that when Ferrer saw the James Avati painting on the book's cover, he all of a sudden felt the proper inspiration to convincingly impersonate Henri.