Typography and early poster advertising in France: from artisanal production to chromolithography, 1850–1870

Under the Second Empire, between 1850 and 1870, poster advertising became widespread in France. Advertisements for food brands, manufactured products and commercial establishments, announcements of publications by publishers and periodicals, and posters for theaters, cabarets and circuses all competed for attention on walls. Technically, production was in its infancy. Between the black-and-white lithography of bookstore posters and the first polychrome trials, thanks to Rouchon’s transposition of wallpaper processes, poster printing remained artisanal and approximate. Illustration and color had a hard time finding their place, and publishers offered their customers mixed solutions that enabled them to print posters with original imagery and plenty of text at low cost. These productions can be described as typographic in that most of their surface area is reserved for printing text via a typographic frame composed of movable characters, engraved in wood for the largest and in lead for the smallest. Some are purely typographic, for reasons of economy, and to capture the attention of passers-by with their spectacular play of letters. Foundries such as Deberny offered an increasingly diversified range of wood typefaces for posters, and establishments such as Bonnet in Paris specialized in the creation of these types, in a register dominated by Norman, Egyptian and antique in all possible variations. Most “letterpress posters” feature a simple illustrated vignette, requiring a single additional printing, usually in black ink lithography. There are sometimes several versions of the same poster, distinguished by the size of the typographic frame around them: this is the case of the famous “Les chats” poster, illustrated with a drawing by Manet for the publication of the Champfleury book in 1868. The advent of chromolithography in the 1870s and 1880s led to a significant decline in the “letterpress poster”, whose use was limited to cheap advertising, two-cent shows and Morris columns until the interwar years.

Documents :

- Feuille des lettres d’affiches de la fonderie Laurent et Deberny. Unfolded poster, contained in the foundry catalog, circa 1850, 50 x 72 cm.

- Specimen poste des caractères en bois de la maison Bonnet & Cie, circa 1865.

Forney Library