Un autre monde, by Grandville, 1843

Grandville (Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, known as, 1803–1847) is one of the great designers of the first half of the 19th century, along with Daumier, Gavarni and Tony Johannot. The illustrated book then experienced an unprecedented boom, thanks in particular to the diffusion of lithography and end-grain wood engraving techniques. Furthermore, bookselling is becoming more democratic and diversified, and the forms and uses of books are being completely renewed, under the leadership of publishers like Curmer or Hetzel.

Grandville, close to republican circles, participated in illustrated satirical journals such as La Caricature morale, littéraire et scénique, then Le Charivari, constantly pursued by the courts. In 1842, His Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux were published by Hetzel and Paulin, subtitled: Études de moeurs contemporaines [Studies of Contemporary Morals], with the collaboration of Balzac, Jules Janin, Charles Nodier, George Sand. The work, in which he displayed his talent as a drawing of anthropomorphic figures, enjoyed considerable success.

The same year 1843, he published under the pseudonym Taxile Delord, Un Autre Monde, in which he disrupted the relationship between text and image, designing a backwards “encyclopedia”, a sum of the ramblings of his time and his own, of which he closely orchestrates texts and images. The work was not successful, but it was exhumed in the 20th century by Pierre Mac Orlan in his article “Grandville le precurseur” published in Arts et métiers graphiques (nº44, December 15th, 1934), where he salutes “this prodigious cerebral feast” whose imagery he compares to that of Méliès and Walt Disney, paving the way for rediscovery by the surrealists. Max Ernst in particular rendered “Homage to Grandville” for the frontispiece of the reissue of Un Autre Monde in 1963.

Document: Taxile Delord, Un Autre Monde, by Fournier, including 36 plates outside the text and 146 woodcuts in the text, 1843.

Musée de la publicité, Paris.