Thesée

[chickenfeet2003]

This evening I took high resolution shots of all of the wood cuts in my copy of Gide's Thesée. This is the letterpress edition with 24 woodcut illustrations by the Polish French artist Abram Krol. It has sentimental value to me because I was introduced to livres d'artiste as an artform by seeing Walter Strachan's copy of this book. Strachan taught at my school though was retired by the time I was there. He was the author of the The Artist and the Book in France and was a close friend of Krol. My copy is one of 24 with an extra suite of prints on japon nacré so it's quite rare and, in my opinion, very beautiful. The full set of photos includes all 48 woodcuts as well as six pictures including the colophon, the slip cover for the extra suite, an index of the illustrations etc.

The full set is here.

Here are a few samples:

The colophon



thesee_colophon, originally uploaded by jgilks@rogers.com.

One of the regular four colour woodcuts



thesee_4, originally uploaded by jgilks@rogers.com.

One of the black and whie suite on japon nacré



thesee_j6, originally uploaded by jgilks@rogers.com.