Imagerie Artistique: 20 Fables de La Fontaine

Abstract

Patience has paid off! I had found two copies of the second volume of this series but had never seen the first volume. Here it is! See my comments there. The cover here has a teacher pointing to one of eleven miniaturized versions of this book's twenty posters. This copy is, as the dealer pointed out, "abimé," but I will take it! My favorites in this collection include FG and "The Two Goats." Along the Seine a year earlier, I found twelve of these posters at a bookstall (along with five from the second volume). Since then I have found a second copy and now in 2018 I have found a third. Cataloguing the last of these has led to fascinating learning and decisions about the three copies. The learning has to do with the publishing house and this series of books which it published. "Imagerie Artistique" was in fact a series of twenty publications between 1886 and 1904, each publication containing twenty large-format colored pages. There were four major divisions: "Historiettes," military history, fables of La Fontaine, and fairy tales. Our two volumes – this first and the second mentioned in the beginning of this comment -- were published in the fables category. The learning about the firm shows that it used four name constellations. These constellations suggest that this volume differs in its year of printing from the other two copies. This one of the three has a unique cover, with "AN[cien]ne" before "Maison Quantin," and a unique title-page, offering four lines at its bottom: "Ancienne Maison Quantin, Librairies-Imprimeries Réunies, May & Motteroz, Directeurs, 7, rue Saint-Benoit, Paris." This copy has some fuzzy printings, markings near the fables' titles, and a loose last page. Wikipedia's information leads to dating this in the second of the four periods between 1886 and 1904 and specifically in either 1891 or 1896. The other two belong in the first period (1886-9), and I have dated them to 1889.