USA 1927

Morand discovered the United States during his travels of the 1920s, and brought back from them less a narrative than a succession of brilliant impressions. He gave his book a subtitle that perfectly defines its project: Album de photographies lyriques. New York, trains, automobiles, signs, crowds, landscapes and speed are captured as though through a camera shutter: a few lines, an image, a sensation, and then already the next. The whole offers a modern America, calling for a modern style of writing — rapid, elliptical, discontinuous, fascinated by movement.

The Americas: a new world whose energy and strangeness Morand perceives and describes at once.

The material conception of the book remarkably extends this aesthetic. Composed in free verse, the text reads 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 vocabulary.

This is the only book illustrated by Pierre Legrain, one of the great innovators of French decorated bookbinding of the interwar period. He clearly inspired, magnificently, nearly 50 years later, Daniel-Henri Mercher, who here produces a remarkable composition based on the very principle of the book — juxtaposition, graphic design, fragments of a country caught in passing.

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