Work illustrated with a frontispiece, 36 superb hand-colored plates hors-texte as well as 146 black wood engravings in-text. Printed on strong laid paper, the plates on tinted paper.
Bound in half red morocco with corners signed at the top of the endpaper L. David. Slightly later binding, ca 1860-1870. Jansenist spine with raised bands. Traces of rubbing. Scattered foxing. 2 leaves 174 and 175 awkwardly cut shorter.
Handsome copy of this beautiful book, 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 fantasmagorias, the work aims to reflect an era in full mutation. Un autre monde tells and illustrates the extraordinary voyages of three neo-gods, Puff, Krackq and Hahblle. [...] It is indeed a philosophical journey that Grandville proposes to 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, the serial novel, advertising, anglomania, philanthropy, phrenology, etc. » (Annie Renonciat, La Vie et l'œuvre de Grandville, Paris, ACR-Vilo, 1985).
Grandville's most sought-after work.