Pages à mon goût
One of 470 copies on vergé d'Arches paper (no. 288) — with 45 hors commerce copies on this paper.
Inscribed and signed: “à Jo Matheron, Seules les pages burinées par Laboureur sont restées ‘à mon goût’ dans ce livre. J’en suis bien désolé, mais il est trop tard pour changer le titre.”
Although “these Pages à mon goût take the form of short texts, prose poems, illustrated with great delicacy by Laboureur — look no further, they are simply notes, images of a single moment, prose to be leafed through by lamplight,” the inscription found in this copy suggests that the winner of the Académie française’s Grand Prix de littérature in 1926 for his complete works might, in his own estimation, have done still better. Be that as it may, Laboureur’s illustrations rank among the finest and most accomplished of the artist’s career.
A now little-known writer, Auguste Gilbert de Voisins nonetheless holds a distinctive place in early twentieth-century French literature. Born in 1877 and died in 1939, he was a novelist, a prose poet and a seasoned traveler, remembered too for his friendship with Victor Segalen, whose companion he was on his travels in China.
Pages à mon goût consists of a series of short prose pieces and small poems, notable also for the encounter it occasioned with Jean-Émile Laboureur. Conceived as early as 1924, the artist spent five years perfecting his engravings, which inaugurated a new vein in his work, marked by a more meticulous observation of living things — insects, small animals and animated nature.
The inscription lends the copy a very particular charm, showing the author freely severe toward himself: everything in the book is dismissed, save for Laboureur’s plates, alone judged worthy of remaining “à [his] goût.”
A fine copy of a book in which the burin, by the author’s own admission, very nearly outshines the text, the whole finely bound by François Brindeau.