New Addition: 1879 Auguste Maquet Poster

Poster of Auguste Maquet, by Cliché Dragon & Lemercier. c.1879. Photoglyptie print. Photopaper on double-sided newsprint w/ critical biography on Maquet verso. Paris-Portrait, Paris. 10" x 14.75"

Auguste Maquet wrote for much of his life under assumed names, but this artifact shows that he eventually achieved a certain degree of popular recognition for his work. As a co-founder of the Bouzingo group, he worked under the pseudonym Augustus Mac-Keat; he published only in journals or copied manuscripts during this period, and I'm not aware of any surviving work from the period unless he is behind the possible pseudonym 'Austuste Bouzenot' in the 1834 Annales Romantiques anthology, an avant-Romanticist essay on Hinduism. In the 1840s and '50s, he co-authored some of the most famous and enduring novels of the 19th Century, including The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, and The Count of Monte-Cristo; but his name was suppressed by publishers to maintain the 'Alexandre Dumas' brand-name--a practice extended to other Dumas collaborators in the avant-garde including Bibliophile Jacob and Léon Gozlan. In 1858 he sued and was legally recognised as a full collaborator on the novels, and went on to become a leader in copyright and writers'-union activism in France; nonetheless their novels continue to this day to be published exclusively under Dumas' name. (There is a movie about Dumas & Maquet, which I still need to watch, with trepidation.)

Alongside his collaborations with Dumas, Maquet not only published a number of novels under his own name (two of them in this archive) but was active as an important Romanticist historian, and co-authored the first systematic, multi-volume history of the French prison system--research that fed directly into his work on Monte Cristo and Iron Mask. (His and Pujol's History of the Dungeon of Vincennes is a part of this archive as well.) He also wrote a number of popular plays in the 1850s, and it was this that led to this poster, part of a series of posters of famous playwrights.

The photograph was mass-produced in 1879 using new, cheap photoglyptie technology, and affixed to a tableau on cheaper paper. On the back is an appreciative critical biography--a detailed blurb, essentially--about Maquet, by the critic Felix Jahyer. Interestingly, it entirely ignores his involvement with avant-garde Romanticism, skipping directly from his graduation in 1831 to the production of his first play in 1839, then tracing his collaborations with Dumas and the subsequent trial. It was published in the Paris-Portrait, an annual publication from which these portraits were intended to be removed.