The phrase "a livre" is not correct in written English.
It appears to be a mix of English and another language, possibly French or Portuguese, and does not convey a clear meaning in English.
Example: "I found a livre on the table." (assuming "livre" is intended to mean "book" in another language, but it is not standard English).
Alternatives: "a book" or "a free one".
Not a livre d'artiste, one of those high-quality collaborations between an artist and a fine-art printer, and certainly not a coffee-table buster.
This one is more tendentious, I think, but for the purposes of mutual masturbation and knocking out a livre, it has, as they say, plus de jambes.
Moorehead relates how one new contact, not yet up on the code and baffled by being told that he was about to be sent a "livre", persisted in asking, "What book?" "An Old Testament, you idiot!" came the exasperated reply.
The value of eighteenth-century currency as compared with modern money, or what money will buy, suggests that the purchasing power of a livre would then have been well above that of the dollar today.
Lancelot du Lac : Part I, sections A and B. Livre du Lancelot du Lac: three miniatures.
The first, Livre A, is for purebred animals with documented Poitou parentage on both sides of their pedigree.
In many regions, a pound (livre) of bread weighed less than a pound (livre) of iron; the volume of a tankard of bière depended on the local interpretation of the pinte.
Shapton's publisher, Drawn & Quarterly, is calling her latest book a Petit Livre – meaning, I think, that it is rather short.
Late last year, as an extra layer of insulation against a severe London winter, I embarked on a project of reading in French the novels I had devoured so eagerly in translation, and which I felt had helped form me. I picked up Camus's book again, only this time in a compact Livre de Poche, dated 1963.
"That is easily said when one is a hundred leagues from the bastards and the fanatics, when one has an independent income of a hundred thousand livres!") But Raffel is wrong, surely, in thinking that by cultivating one's garden Voltaire meant anything save cultivating one's garden.
("Crush the horror! Crush the horror!" Voltaire's friend D'Alembert wrote to him once. "That is easily said when one is a hundred leagues from the bastards and the fanatics, when one has an independent income of a hundred thousand livres!") But Raffel is wrong, surely, in thinking that by cultivating one's garden Voltaire meant anything save cultivating one's garden.
