New Addition: 1852 edition of Nodier's early experiment in fractured narrative & visual writing

Charles Nodier, Les Sept Chateaux du roi de bohême / Les Quartre talismans. (1852). Illust. Tony Johannot, Napoleon Thomas, et. al. Victor Lecou, Paris. Sextodecimo, 326 pp. Quarter Leather. Original publication was in 1829. Inscribed by 19th Century reader: "J.L."


Here's a kind of photo-essay on a very exciting addition to the archive. Apologies for the poor photo quality, I hope to get proper scans online as soon as I'm able to.

Charles Nodier exercised a tremendous influence on the first generation of the avant-garde in his myriad capacities as Frenetic novelist, organiser, archivist, critic, bibliographer, theorist, and linguist--indeed, the 'Petit-Cénacle' group, later renamed the Bouzingo, took their first moniker in tribute to Nodier's own 'Cénacle' salons, to which they were regular guests when this volume was published in 1829. At the time, Histoire du roi de bohême was considered his most radical book, and was recognised as a seminal influence on avant-garde Romanticist typography, book design, illustration, and narrative technique.

 

Steeped in Rabelais, Sterne, Peacock, etc., the story is wildly experimental and formally fractured, with sections written in dialogue, as advertisements, as lists, as as fake publishers' notes, and spinning off into chapter-long diversions into etymology, obscure history and other apparently tangential subjects. 

 

                                      
The typography, formatting, and integration of text and illustration are startlingly playful, and display the seeds of Apollinaire's calligrammes and other visual writing as the typography begins to intrude upon, mimic, and dissolve the semantic coherence of the narration. 

One chapter comprises an extremely early example of a phonetic poem--90 years before Morgenstern's and Marinetti's experiments with the form:

The illustrations and decorations are by Tony Johannot, who remained one of the most important illustrators of underground Romanticism, a close friend of Célestin Nantueil, and a pioneer of French political cartooning.

 

 Also included in this volume is Nodier's 30-page essay 'Du Fantastique en littérature' (On the Fantastic in Literature), which provided much of the theoretical underpinning for Frenetic Romanticism, and four 'fantastic' stories first published in 1838, including some illustrations by the obscure Bouzingo artist Napoleon Thomas, which (to my knowledge) have gone uncredited for over a century and a half.