- About Bookbinding -

Pictorial Poster part 3

In M. Cheret's book covers we see the same freshness of touch, the same Japanese freedom of design, the same fantasy of invention, the same exceeding skill in the combination and contrast of simple colors, which delight us in his pictorial posters. We see also the same ingenuity in the adapting of the means to the end. M. Cheret's decoration, when he has been most inspired, consists of a single design covering the back and both of the sides of the wrapper, and adroitly devised so that each side has its own ornament. An excellent example of this is his cover for a sensational novel called" Pile de Pont," with its single stalwart figure of a man projected blackly within the light circle made by an arch of the bridge and its reflection in the water flowing placidly beneath, while the bridge extends its successive arches one behind the other across the back and around the other side of the wrapper. Another example is the cover of M. Lefevre's "Scaramouche," with its Mephistophelian figure silhouetted sharply above the joyous trio of Pierrot, Columbine, and Harlequin. This wrapper is unusually effective and harmonious in colour.

Of M. Willette's cover for "L'Enfant Prodigue" I have already made mention. Of M. Grasset's cover for the "Dix Contes" of M. Jules Lemaitre I have no space to speak at length. It is one of the most elaborate and sumptuous of French paper-covers, and, like M. Grasset's pictorial posters, it suggests the rich and solid translucency of stained glass. Modern and French as are both M. Grasset and M. Cheret, the one seems to have found his inspiration in a medic:eval cathedral, and the other in a Japanese theatre. In the richly polychromatic design M. Auriol has made for M. Octave Uzanne's "Contes pour les Bibliophiles," perhaps the first thing to strike us is a certain rigidity of the reading figures who pass before us in "stained-glass attitudes." In the equally unusual and effective decoration M. Carloz Schwabe devised for M. Emile Zola's ecclesiastical tale, "Le Reye," probably what we note before anything else is the strange complication of the design and its elaborate symbolism.

Of M. Steinlen I know no pictorial poster; but none the less is he the author of two of the most novel of recent French book-covers. One is for a book of M. Aristide Bruant's unconventional and unspeakable songs of the Paris streets, "Dans la Rue." It consists of a file of sandwichmen, beginning with a weather-worn old fellow (on the front), and extending (around the back) out into the gaslit darkness of a damp and wintry boulevard. The other was made for one of M. Jules Moinaux'S humorous legal year books, "Les Tribunaux Comiques." Here the artist makes a clever and novel combination of figures colored naturally, with solid silhouettes extending in panoramic procession around the back of the volume.

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