The Grimoire is a textbook on commutative algebra
for advanced master students and graduate students,
that I started writing in early 2014, and completed
in January 2022.
Some of its last chapters could be interesting also
to more advanced researchers. It is written in French.
Here you can freely download the complete and final text :
Your comments are welcome and gratefully acknowledged!
The Blog of the Grimoire Project documented the project from its beginning in
2014 all the way to its conclusion in January 2022.
UPDATE May 2026 : Yesterday,
the new website
of Les Presses Insoumises was unveiled! The new website of LPI is hosted
by the cloud computing company Netlify and will eventually replace the
current website, that is hosted by Ecwid. Both the new and the old websites
are currently functional, but the Ecwid website will be deactivated around
early November this year. The Ecwid product was originally available free
of charge, but last year the free option was discontinued, and replaced by
a basic plan that charges 72 Euros per year. This plan has the same solid,
efficient and user-friendly capabilities as the original free plan, and the
price is certainly more than reasonable for the budget of most e-business.
But LPI is a micro-business that runs on essentially no budget at all, relying
on free-of-charge and open source tools and services as much as possible, so
I've been looking for alternative hosting solutions, and the website hosting
offers of Netlify do provide an excellent solution.
The coding for the website was developed with the invaluable assistance of
Claude, Anthropic's AI, that kindly made available his competence for free.
The result is a fully functional website, on which you can order our volumes
and pay by credit card, just as on the Ecwid website. The credit card transaction
is still handled by Stripe, so enterprise-level privacy and security are still
assured. Check it out and let me know what you think!
UPDATE June 2025 : An unfortunate news concerning the shipping
rates for the Grimoire : until now, for destinations outside of France, we used a special
shipping option (the so-called "tariffe livres et brochures") reserved for sending abroad
cultural material written in french. This tariff was created 22 years ago by the french postal
service, as a means to encourage the spread of french culture in the world. Unfortunately,
in the last several years, priorities have been shifting, and early
this year the french postal service has announced that this tariff will be discontinued
in July. This leaves countless of small french independent publishers and
self-publishing authors without a good option for shipping their works to non-french
audiences. Indeed, the alternatives are much more expensive : as a result of these changes,
the cost of shipping the Grimoire outside France will rise sharply, starting from July : for
european destinations it will be around 25 Euros, and for other destinations it should be
probably around 35 Euros. So, if you are a resident of a non-european country, you might
want to find some friend who lives in Europe (or better, in France), have the book shipped
to them, and ask them to bring it over to you on their next trip! (Just a suggestion)
UPDATE June 2023 :
The second printing of the Grimoire
is here! It has taken a little more than one year to reach this milestone! The price of the second printing is the same as for the first printing; the second printing corrects all the misprints that have been pointed out by our eagle-eyed readers. The paper is slightly different : whereas the grammage of the first printing was 50gr/m^2, for the second printing I've tried 60gr/m^2 : this means that the volume is about 200gr heavier, and also 7mm thicker. Apart from that, it is still the same friendly satanic volume!
As of April 12, 2022, the Grimoire is available
in print. In March 2022 I have created the Publishing House
Les Presses Insoumises
to publish and distribute the paper version
of the Grimoire. Here is the website (see the update above of May 2026) :
From the publisher's website you can buy
the book for 50 Euros
plus shipping expenses : we ship all over the world!
The payment is via credit card, just like you would do on Amazon.
If you're interested in such things, the credit card securized
transaction is handled via Stripe.
By the way : if you think this project is useful, one easy
way to support it, is by asking your local math library to buy
one (or more) copies.
The book can also be ordered from several french bookstores; here
is a sample :
Though, if you live in Paris you can also contact me directly,
and then I can meet you somewhere to hand you a copy : in this
way you avoid the shipping expenses.