Jean de la Fontaine: Fables I

Abstract

This volume contains the first six books of La Fontaine's fables. Bouffay's style is like nothing I have seen before. It is entirely in black-and-white. The illustrations, all full-page, present a character rather than a group of characters or a fable scene. Each portrait consists entirely of fluid india-ink lines. Some of them are quite broad and strong. Others are more a wave of small dots. The effect is slightly psychodelic and often quite imposing. Thus the first regular illustration (16) is CJ, with the pearl clearly visible in the cock's mouth. The frog for OF (36) is huge not so much from a bloated belly as in the way he takes up the page. Do not miss the tortoise at 228. The pattern seems to be that there is an illustration at the start of each new book and each section; there are thus illustrations before the title-page, life of Aesop, and T of C. This work was reserved to the Circle of Bibliophile Professors of France. It is recorded in neither Bassy nor Bodemann. Only the first of the three volumes is numbered, although the appropriate colophon appears at the end of each volume. In the other volumes, it tells the reader, among other things, to look in Volume I for the number.