Aesop's Fables > Aesop's Artifacts > Other Printed Materials > Accordion-Like Series of Illustrations

Accordion-Like Series of Illustrations

By sheer happenstance, I have come across items from France in perhaps 1900 and Russia in 1940 that have similar unusual formats.  They unfold with a number of images in horizontal series.  How curious!

1900?  Suite of 24 Connected Illustrations “Fables Choisies de La Fontaine.”  Each 4.5” x 2.9”.  180 Euros from Michel Bouvier through e-Salons SLAM., April, ’26. 

This fragile set of images is fragile, and it is beautifully hand-colored!  Apparently, the cards were originally printed connected with each other at the fold after each illustration.  And the publisher then, apparently, enclosed them in a sturdier cover.  Later hands may have pasted them into the cover.  Indeed, the first illustration is clumsily pasted in backwards!  The illustrations are after Grandville: clearly inspired by them but different.  The great feature of this set lies in the brilliant hand-coloring.  The ensemble remains highly fragile.

1940 Pictures from Krylov’s Fables (Russian).  Series One.    Leningrad Printing Union of Board Games Artel Pioneer.  Leningrad: Degtyarnaya.  Unknown source.

This is a series of 12 lovely colored fable illustrations, about 4.25” x 3.25”.  The first two are pasted onto the insides of the stiff covers.  The last ten are front and back in a folded sort of accordion.  The fables are WC; CJ; “The Crow and the Boar”; WL; LM; FG; FC; “The Donkey and the Nightingale”; “The Wolf and the Cat”; and OF.  My what Leningrad must have been in 1940!

 

 

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