New Addition! Anthology of Illustrated Novellas: Nanteuil, Esquiros, Johannot, Monnier, and others

Romans, ed. Gustave Barba & J. Bry Ainé. (Undated, c. 1849-1855) Privately selected & bound volume of novellas from Romans populaires illustrés, Veillées litteraires illustrées, Illustrations littéraires, Pantheon populaire illustrée, and Oeuvres illustrées de Balzac series: Alphonse Esquiros (see 'Historiography'), Charlotte Corday; Henri de Lacretelle, Le Dernier roi (The Last King), illust. Célestin Nanteuil; Honoré de Balzac, La Recherche de l'absolu (The Search for the Absolute) & Un Épisode sous la terreur (An Episode Under the Terror), title-tableau by Célestin Nanteuil, illust. Tony Johannot (see 'Illustration & Editing' for both), Henri Monnier (see "Biographies & Monographs), Bertall, E. Lampsonius & others; Captain Marryat, Pierre Simple & Japhet, illust. Bertall; Louis Garneray, Captivité de Garneray--Neuf années en angleterre: Mes Pontons (My Pontoons), illust. Louis Garneray & Janet-Lange; Paul de Kock, La Pucelle de Belleville (The Maiden of Belleville), illust. Bertall; de Kock, Les Mésaventures d'un anglais (The Misadventures of an Englishman) & Petits tableaux de moeurs (Little Picture of Customs); and Paul Féval, Le Banquier de cire (The Waxen Banker), illust. E. Forest.
Hardbound Folio, 430 pp. Handwritten Table of Contents by 19th Century owner on back flyleaf.

From the late 1840s through the mid-1850s, several popular series of illustrated novels--all using the same format and pricing--competed for the expanding literary market. Produced for a mass readership, their illustrators were a combination of commercial hacks and respected Romanticist illustrators such as Nanteuil and Johannot who were increasingly forced to forego their own developed styles and experimentation in favour of the accepted style of popular vignettes, thus allowing publishers to combine images by multiple engravers and pump out more books more quickly.

This volume is probably one-of-a-kind and collects some of its first owners' personal favourites custom-bound into one book, with a hand-written table of contents on the back fly-leaf. It includes a heterogeneous mix of ten novellas, including one on the Revolutionary heroine Charlotte Corday by the Evadamiste socialist-occultist & friend of the Bouzingo Alphonse Esquiros (see his anthology of proletarian poetry in 'Anthologies') and prominent Romanticist novelist Balzac, an early Sci-Fi novel called The Last King illustrated (mostly) by ex-Bouzingo Célestin Nanteuil, and others illustrated by his frequent collaborators Johannot & Monnier. (See 'Illustration' and 'Monographs' for all three.)