NATIONAL COSTUMES Lepage-Medvey, 1939 1st Edition — POCHOIR PRINTS, Austria Etc 
NATIONAL COSTUMES Lepage-Medvey, 1939 1st Edition — POCHOIR PRINTS, Austria Etc 
NATIONAL COSTUMES Lepage-Medvey, 1939 1st Edition — POCHOIR PRINTS, Austria Etc 
NATIONAL COSTUMES Lepage-Medvey, 1939 1st Edition — POCHOIR PRINTS, Austria Etc 
NATIONAL COSTUMES Lepage-Medvey, 1939 1st Edition — POCHOIR PRINTS, Austria Etc 
NATIONAL COSTUMES Lepage-Medvey, 1939 1st Edition — POCHOIR PRINTS, Austria Etc 
NATIONAL COSTUMES Lepage-Medvey, 1939 1st Edition — POCHOIR PRINTS, Austria Etc 
NATIONAL COSTUMES Lepage-Medvey, 1939 1st Edition — POCHOIR PRINTS, Austria Etc 
NATIONAL COSTUMES Lepage-Medvey, 1939 1st Edition — POCHOIR PRINTS, Austria Etc 
NATIONAL COSTUMES Lepage-Medvey, 1939 1st Edition — POCHOIR PRINTS, Austria Etc 
NATIONAL COSTUMES Lepage-Medvey, 1939 1st Edition — POCHOIR PRINTS, Austria Etc 
NATIONAL COSTUMES Lepage-Medvey, 1939 1st Edition — POCHOIR PRINTS, Austria Etc 

NATIONAL COSTUMES Lepage-Medvey, 1939 1st Edition — POCHOIR PRINTS, Austria Etc 

Regular price $65.00 Sale

NATIONAL COSTUMES: Austria-Hungary-Poland-Czechoslovakia, designed by Lepage-Medvey with a preface by Andre Varagnac. English translation by S P Skipwith.

Beige cloth w/dark brown spine and front board titles, small folio (9 1/2" x 12 1/2"), 20 preliminary pages which include descriptive text followed by forty (40) tissue guarded plates, printed in the painstaking pochoir stencil method, on very heavy card stock. Ten plates for each country.

Verso of 1/2 title page makes note of publishing data and mentions photolithography — these are pochoir plates with stenciled color that are bright, vibrant and in a wonderful realism style. 

The Art of the Pochoir Book

The effect is arresting: paging through the leaves of a pochoir-illustrated book, the reader is abruptly stopped by the extraordinary effects of lush, vibrant colors and bold geometric shapes.  Bright oils and watercolors seem to come alive on the page in an almost three-dimensional experience.  These volumes, with their focus on patterns and color interactions, use a stenciling technique to present decorative arts and the possibilities of book printing.  

In fact, pochoir is the French word for stenciling, a form of coloring pictures that dates to a thousand years ago in China.  It was introduced to commercial publishing in France in the late 1800s, and there it had its most exquisite expression.  The pochoir process would use from 20 to 250 different stencils applied to a black-and-white collotype print from a photograph.  The collotypes are affixed to stencil sheets of metal or board, and the patches to be colored are cut out.  Each color to be applied uses a separate pompon, or brush of coarse, shortly-cropped animal hair, to sponge or dab on the paint.  Each stencil is done in turn until the image is finished, so it is essential to place the stencils exactly in position.

Though pochoir illustration had its heyday in the 1920s, with Paris as its center of greatest artistic production, several places produced pochoir books during this decade, including London, Florence, New York, and the avant-garde publishers of Prague and other Eastern European cities.  In the United States, pochoir gave way quite early to related methods like serigraphy and silk-screening.  Occasionally today some fine press books are illustrated using the pochoir method, but its most sumptuous flowering eight decades ago represents a remarkable era in the history of the book.


DETAILS:

- Hardcover with Dust Jacket
- Publisher: Paris - Hyperion Press: 1939
- Condition:  All collotypes are in very good condition with corresponding tissue guards. The collotypes are crisp, clean and retain full color and detail. The published volume has 20 text pages. This copy is missing the text pages 1 - 6. However, this copy retains the title page and the corresponding title author and publisher page. The title page has some wear on the bottom. The board and spine are in excellent condition. The binding is tight. The dust jackets is in good condition with minor tears to top of dust jacket. Also, small corner of the spine portion of the dust jacket has torn.  

A very rare, and highly collectable book of historical collotypes of European costumes from Eastern Europe.