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 to be Grandville's masterpiece, with illustrations in first print. Illustrated frontispiece, 36 colored illustrations and 146 in-text woodcuts in black.
Contemporary binding in half black shagreen, spine with raised bands ruled in gilt, black paper boards framed in gilt, a scratch with loss of paper to the upper right corner of the upper board, small scuffs on the covers, yellow endpapers, all edges gilt.
Handsome copy of this beautiful book, a precursor to Surrealism.
This exuberant and prodigious production of Grandville and Delord (whose name is printed at the bottom of page 292), judged by its contemporaries as already being mad, was rediscovered by the Surrealists.
“Published in 1844 by éditions Fournier, Un autre monde is Grandville's masterpiece. The book is subtitled Transformations, visions, incarnations, ascensions, locomotions, explorations, travels, excursions, stations, cosmogonies, phantasmagorias, dreams, frolics, facetiae, whims, metamorphosis, zoomorphs, lithomorphosis, metempsychosis, apotheosis and other things. With its transformations, its inventions and its phantasmagoria, the work claims to reflect a changing era. Un autre monde recounts and illustrates the extraordinary travels of three neo-gods, Puff, Krackq and Hahblle. [...] It is indeed a philosophical journey that Grandville takes us on [...] The reader, led to a strange planet imagined by the artist, is invited, like Gulliver in the Country of Laputa, on a parodic journey of his philosophical, scientific, economic and religious ideas, of his passions, inventions and worries: romanticism, mechanisation, socialism, money, serial, publicity, anglomania, philanthropy, phrenology, etc.” (Annie Renonciat, La Vie et l'œuvre de Grandville, Paris, ACR-Vilo, 1985).
Grandville's most sought-after work.