USA 1927

Morand discovered the United States during his travels in the 1920s, and brought back not so much a narrative as a succession of vivid impressions. He gave his book a subtitle that perfectly defines its purpose: Album de photographies lyriques. New York, trains, automobiles, signs, crowds, landscapes and speed are captured as though by a camera shutter: a few lines, an image, a sensation, then already the next. Together they offer a modern America, calling for a modern style of writing — rapid, elliptical, discontinuous and fascinated by movement.

The Americas, a new world whose energy and strangeness Morand simultaneously perceives and describes.

The physical design of the book remarkably extends this aesthetic. Composed in free verse, the text is meant to be read widthwise, an unusual layout that has been compared to a railway timetable. Pierre Legrain’s 18 geometric compositions punctuate this American crossing in a resolutely Art Deco idiom.

This is the only book illustrated by Pierre Legrain, one of the great innovators of French decorative bookbinding between the wars. He clearly provided a magnificent inspiration, nearly 50 years later, to Daniel-Henri Mercher, who here creates a remarkable composition based on the very principle of the book — juxtaposition, graphic design, fragments of a country caught on the fly.

A highly successful binding on a great small text by Morand.