La Boîte à pêche

In the field of inexpensive literary editions, two rival publishers competed from 1923 onward in the market for illustrated editions: Fayard and Ferenczi. The former with its collection “Le Livre de demain,” launched in February 1923, the latter with “Le Livre moderne illustré,” launched in June of the same year. Both collections were emblematic of the revival of the woodcut-illustrated book in a context of democratization of the luxury book: “These two rival collections popularized French literature for two to three generations… Their success at the time derived largely from their illustrations, mostly wood engravings. This corpus of engravings is by far the largest, numerically, of any interwar production — on the order of ten thousand original woodblocks, meaning designed and engraved by the same artist.” (Jean-Michel Galland, “Les gravures sur bois des collections Fayard et Ferenczi,” Nouvelles de l’estampe, no. 254).

Ferenczi’s “Le Livre moderne illustré” collection ran until 1954, with a total of 366 titles published. Its covers, well known to collectors and bibliophiles, are easily recognizable by their monochrome woodcut with “floral and animal” motifs, in an Art Deco style, in a composition designed by Clément Serveau. Serveau, after studying at the École nationale des arts décoratifs and then at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris from 1904 to 1914, became artistic director of Éditions Ferenczi in 1919. Using the woodcut technique, he illustrated seventy-eight of the collection’s titles, whose literary direction was overseen by Colette for several years. The artists’ wood engravings were reproduced “thanks to the valuable process of electrotyping, consisting of a copper cast called a galvano, which reproduces the values of the original wood with remarkable fidelity, allowing large print runs to be printed without using the woodblocks themselves, which risk being worn or broken by excessive impression.” (Carteret, Le Trésor du bibliophile: livres illustrés modernes).

Most French writers of the 1920s to 1940s had works published in this popular collection: Francis Carco, André Malraux, Georges Duhamel, Colette, Francis de Miomandre, François Mauriac, Joseph Kessel, Raymond Radiguet, André Maurois, Irène Némirovsky, Blaise Cendrars and Paul Morand. Few foreign authors appear in it, though Stefan Zweig is notably among them.

Maurice Genevoix entered the collection in 1926, with La Joie. It was followed by Raboliot in 1927, Les Mains vides in 1931, and this Boîte à pêche in 1933.

From the library of Maurice Genevoix, at “Les Vernelles” (bookplate).