Un Autre Monde

Transformations, Visions, Incarnations, Ascensions, Locomotions, Explorations, Peregrinations, Excursions, Stations, Cosmogonies, Fantasmagories, Reveries, Folatreries, Faceties, Lubies, Metamorphoses, Zoomorphoses, Lithomorphoses, Metempsycoses, Apotheoses, et Autres Choses

Paris: H. Fournier, 1844.

First Edition. Post 8vo (10 x 8 ins); pp [iv] + [296] with 42 plates, 35 of which are hand-coloured (some only partially), one of the colour plates loose with tattered fore edge. Toning to endpapers and some light scattered foxing throughout. Rebound in later half calf over tan brown boards, raised band to spine with contrasting label. Tips of corners rubbed and bumped; a couple of light surface abrasion marks to calf. Half-title, verso of h-t and titlepage printed in red. With facsimile copies of the original wrappers bound in at the front and back. Grandville's startling designs of fantastical mises-en-scènes must almost certainly have influenced Sir John Tenniel when he created the characters for Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland'. "Grandville's 'Un Autre Monde'... is a parody of nineteenth-century utopianism. One of the themes that the artist and his anonymous collaborator (the author Taxile Delord) are interested in exploring is the way in which the public's desire to contemplate and, indeed, to possess visions of alternative modes of existence had led to the commodification of utopianism in their day. In the book, the artists' use of parody shows how the products of the imagination occasion a series of derivatives not unlike – and often rigourously identical to – the paratext."