Le Pecheur de Lune.

£700 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Very good, text pages darkened at edges. Marcel Pautot was first and foremost a commercial sculptor and metalsmith, creating medals and perfume bottles in France during the mid-twentieth century, but he also experimented with printing, illustrating four books using the eccentric technique of gypsography. Gypsography was pioneered by another French sculptor, Pierre Roche, in the 1890’s and was best described by him as a ‘procedure by which one executes, inks and pulls prints on plaster’, creating a three-dimensional print with ‘a particular texture and great softness of modelling’ which was then hand-coloured, creating in effect a monotype. Little is known about Pautot as an illustrator, but it seems likely that Le Pêcheur de Lune was his first attempt, with three other works following in quick succession. The text seems to have been printed by a local jobbing printer in Nice on the Avenue de la Victoire, whose typesetting and choice of paper leave something to be desired. The illustrations, on the other hand, were printed by Pautot himself, most likely from metal molds, and all are small vignettes, which were hand coloured, then cut out and glued onto plates tipped in to the text. A survey by William Cole of multiple copies of another work by Pautot suggests that this was an unregulated process, with each copy showing not only radical differences in the colouring of each image, but with a different selection of images in each copy. It is not clear whether this reflects the re

• Year: 1950

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.