Un autre monde - Transformations, visions, incarnations, ascensions, locomotions, explorations, pérégrinations, excursions, stations, cosmogonies, fantasmagories, rêveries, folatreries, facéties, lubies, métamorphoses, zoomorphoses, lithomorphoses, métempsychoses, apothéoses et autres choses
First edition of this work considered Grandville's masterpiece and first printing of the illustrations.
Work illustrated with a frontispiece, 36 superb hand-colored plates and 146 black woodcuts in the text.
Contemporary half-shagreen binding in red, spine with raised bands outlined with gilt fillets and decorated with triple gilt compartments ornamented with gilt floral motifs, joints cracked at head and foot, some rubbing traces on spine, marbled paper boards, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, all edges gilt.
Handsome copy, virtually free from foxing, of this beautiful book that was a precursor to surrealism.
This delirious and prodigious production by Grandville and Delord (whose name is printed at the bottom of page 292), judged by his contemporaries as already mad, was rediscovered by the surrealists.
« Published in 1844 by Fournier editions, Un autre monde is Grandville's masterpiece. The book has the subtitle Transformations, visions, incarnations, ascensions, locomotions, explorations, pérégrinations, excursions, stations, cosmogonies, fantasmagories, rêveries, folâtreries, facéties, lubies, métamorphoses, zoomorphoses, lithomorphoses, métempsycoses, apothéoses et autres choses. With its transformations, inventions and fantasmagories, the work aims to reflect an era in full transformation. Un autre monde recounts and illustrates the extraordinary voyages of three neo-gods, Puff, Krackq and Hahblle. [...] It is indeed a philosophical voyage that Grandville offers us [...] The reader, led to a strange planet imagined by the artist, is invited, like Gulliver in the land of Laputa, to a parodic journey through his philosophical, scientific, economic and religious ideals, his enthusiasms, inventions and preoccupations: romanticism, mechanization, socialism, money, serialized novels, advertising, Anglomania, philanthropy, phrenology, etc. » (Annie Renonciat, La Vie et l'œuvre de Grandville, Paris, ACR-Vilo, 1985).
Grandville's most sought-after work.
