Histoire du Roi de Bohême et de ses sept châteaux by Charles Nodier, 1830

Charles Nodier’s 1830 work merges text and image to captivate Romantic-era readers.

Histoire du Roi de Bohême et de ses sept châteaux by Charles Nodier, illustrated by Tony Johannot, was published in January 1830, in the early days of Romanticism. The fifty illustrations by Tony Johannot and the punchcutter Porret use the new technique of woodcutting, allowing the image to be integrated into the typography.

“It’s only a pastiche”, says the author at the start of the book, from which he borrows the title from Sterne, as well as a number of typographical fantasies. The interminable nomenclatures are another notable borrowing from Rabelais. The book has two title pages: the first at the beginning, in didot typeface and very classical in style, and the second, a few dozen pages later, in Gothic mixed with fancy typefaces.

In the “Protestation” chapter, Nodier claims to arrange the letters as he pleases. He does this in a radical way throughout the work. The text is turned upside down, and in the narrative, signs announce those of Aragon’s Paysan de Paris or Surrealist proverbs. Typefaces grow larger from one line to the next, and staggered and decreasing alignments draw a panpipes pattern. To illustrate the expression “down the stairs”, the lines are staggered. A list of insect names is composed in one column on eight and a half pages. Exclamation marks invade the pages. An entire chapter is made up of onomatopoeia. The “Distraction” chapter has three lines composed in reverse. “Position” has only two lines and one vignette.

Interesting to Hugo and Nerval, exciting to Delacroix and Balzac, Histoire du roi de Bohême et de ses sept châteaux is one of the earliest examples of a book inspired by the relationship between text and image in two-cent periodicals and the illustrated press. It embodies the tension of the century, between the desire for the printed image intended for the greatest number and the love for the beautiful, rare book, destined for an elite.

Document: Charles Nodier, Histoire du roi de Bohème et de ses sept châteaux, illustrations by Tony Johannot, woodcut by Porret, Brussels, L. Hauman et Cie, 1830.

École Estienne library.