Broadsides

1920? Broadside presenting four fables with titles, images, and morals. Page 5205. $10 from Janet Vachon, Aurora, ME, April, '14. I discovered this piece among purchased materials ten years alter. Might it be a printing on sturdier card stock of a page from one of those encyclopedias that offer all sorts of snippets? The verso, 5206, begins a piece titled "The World on a Table." We have several such encyclopedias among our books, but none of the page numbers seem to align with those here.

2020? Fifteen broadsides re-presenting Percy Billinghurst's illustrations with J.B. Rundell's texts on heavy stock. 14" x 10¾". $10 each from Shakespeare, Berkeley, July, '22. These are attractive broadsides, nicely printed. Strong work with various colored inks. There are two striking anomalies. One is that the standard J.B. Rundell texts used regularly in Conkey editions of Aesop are used here but labeled as coming from "L'Estrange." The other anomaly was already present in the early Conkey editions: Billnghurst did these illustrations for La Fontaine's fables.

1960? Eighteen reproductions of posters done about 1890 by Maison Quantin. The artists include H. Vogel, Gaston Gélibert, Mangonot, Godefroy, Etienne-Maurice-Firmin Bouisset, (Anatole Paul?) Ray, Job (=Jacques Marie Gaston Onfroy de Breville), and Gustave Fraipont. €10 each from Librairie AMK, Marche Dauphine, Saint-Ouen, June, '19. These reproductions are well done. The seller estimated the date as 1960. Several things have been removed from the original, including the text of the fable, found generally in a box with the original animal characters, and the artist's signature. The range of these illustrations is fuller than in the larger broadsides, and the illustration "behind" the text box is filled in nicely.

1917? "La Fontaine l'avait bien dit!..." "Dessins de Louis Morin." Paris: Imprimerie Montsouris, P. Orsoni, directeur." Essay by Georges Blondel on the verso. 21½" x 14½. Perhaps €15, perhaps in St.-Ouen. A fascinating piece of work with verses taken or adapted from La Fontaine's fables and applied to the Germans in WWI. I can find another product of "Imprimerie de Montsouris P. Orsoni" on the web, dated 1916. The imagery here is sometimes rough but thoroughly challenging!

1870? Framed broadside presenting six colored fable scenes. 13" x 9½". Framed by worn tape. Chez Jean, Rue St. Jean de Beauvais #10. No. 33. €10 from guymarie justin through Ebay, April, '22. I am surprised that this very fragile piece arrived intact. It seems to have five colors: red, pink, yellow, brown, and green. "Fox in the Well"; "Fox and Bust"; CJ; WL; TH; and "The Man with the Wooden Idol." The color seems to be applied to areas rather than to the outlines of difficult objects like bushes

1880? Two fables of Florian. Broadside. "L'Enfant et le Miroir" and "L'Avare et son Fils." 15” x 12.5.” Metz: Gangel. €20 from chcestampnet through Ebay, Jan., '22. Lively reds and blues render these two fables. The second is among Florian's wittiest: the miser father deserves his smarter talkback son! What will this son become when he becomes the miser?! Because people tend not to know the plots, I will summarize them briefly here. In "The Child and the Looking-Glass," a child first smiles and then grimaces at a mirror, and gets angered by the grimaces he sees. His mother catches him in his rage. "If you smile, it will smile back. Whatever you do, the image will do the same to you." In the second fable, a miser buys apples and locks them away but likes to look at them. Alas, some rot, and those he eats. His famished son gets the key and eats a lot of them with two little friends. "Give them back!" his father demands when he finds them out. Son: "Don't worry, Dad. We're all decent fellows. We leave the bad apples for you to eat; we ate only the healthy ones."

2011? "A Fable," broadside designed and printed by hand on handmade paper by André Chaves. "Another Poet's version of The Raven presented to the Zamorano Club." Clinker Press. 10¼" x 16". $80 from Oak Knoll Books, Oct., '21. In 2011 Chaves at the Clinker Press produced a version of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." Might this broadside of Cowper's poem have been a companion piece? Dramatic work on a poem surrounded by a repeated printer's design involving a raven. The fable is about a mother raven who fears for her newly laid eggs in the storm and is then relieved -- only to have "neighbour Hodge" come the next morning to steal the eggs to give to his girlfriend. "Fate steals along with silent tread, found oft'nest in what least we dread."

1890? Twenty-two printed sheets, 12½" x 16¼", each featuring either an individual fable of La Fontaine or a set of four fables. Each is numbered in an apparent set of 25. Now I have found the whole set of 25 gathered in a book, Fables de la Fontaine, for which I have guessed a date of the same year. Matted on white cardboard. Missing are #3, #7, and #20. There is one extra copy of #14. Each is marked "Série Supérieure aux Armes d'Épinal, Pellerin & Cie, imp. -édit." and "Fables de LA FONTAINE (Hors Groupes)." I bought 21 of them as a group from a Buchinist along the Seine, August, '99; individually they were priced between 70 and 120 Francs each, but we settled on a group price of 1150 Francs for the twenty-one. I found two others at another Buchinist stall just a few minutes later and paid 75 Francs each for them. Click on any image to see it enlarged. I had long thought that Pellerin, whose beautiful printing work I had seen elsewhere, must have done a set of fables. What a great surprise to find them! On almost all, the color work is still lively; on several it is brilliant, especially MSA (#8), "Le Coche et la Mouche" (#9), "L'Oeil du Maitre" (# 10), and "La Besace" (#22). Each page includes a title at the top. Somewhere on the page, the text of the fable appears. The first, WL, is bleached, perhaps from standing out at the front of the group too long under the Paris sun!

1870? Two Pellerin broadsides presenting multiple stories. #924 and #925. €3.25 each from "antikobjet 84200" through Ebay, Dec., '23. I have created a third "epoch" of Pellerin broadsides because the numbering system for these two does not fit with either of the numbering systems I have already found at work and put under "1850?" and "1890?" Both are on very light paper, and one deals with three stories and the other with two. Each uses three colors: red, blue, and yellow. There is surely fascinating history behind these strong presentations of La Fontaine's fables!

1870? Now, in 2022, I am gathering together our 25 broadsides, including three duplicates, from L'Imagerie d'Épinal. These were found in groups at various times. There seem to be two sets of publications. I list a more recent set, differently numbered, under "Pellerin 1890," though I am as unsure of that date as I am of this earlier set's date. A set of 12 from Ramses for €20 each through Ebay in Sept., '20 and another set in Nov., '21. A set for €16 each from Istrilene through Ebay in Oct., '21. A set of seven on heavier stock from an unknown source. Some of these broadsides look more like pages torn from a book, and one can find those Pellerin books scattered through the collection. Several are duplicates bought in different groups. As with the illustrations in earlier Pellerin book publications around 1910, each broadside here is numbered either between 400 and 455 or between 3007 and 3088.

1840? La Vieille et les Deux Servantes. Broadside. 10.5” x 15.5.” Imagerie Nouvelle. $34.45 from Donald Heald, Sept. 20, '02. Extra copy for perhaps €10, perhaps at St.-Ouen, July, '19. This broadside features a fable by Jean de la Fontaine titled “La Vielle et les Deux Servantes.” The poster has twelve scenes drawn out in ink and then printed on the paper along with captions describing the images. All of the captioning and words are written in French.

1900? Three broadsides from Imagerie Nouvelle, presenting TB; "The Ass and Lapdog"; and "The Ass Carrying Relics." €9.90 each from bdsetrevuessympas through Ebay, Feb., '23. As I have remarked about one of the bound versions of Imagerie Nouvelle broadsides, they seem a poor man's Pellerin. Each poster has its own way of integrating text and images. Is that a tabernacle being carried by the ass attended by a monk? As elsewhere, I have questions about coloring of some figures, like that of the ass approaching his seated owner. All three of these sheets bear seven old staple impressions, curiously unevenly spaced. I presume they once were portions of a published album of broadsides like the other in our collection.