Title: NATIONAL COSTUMES: Austria-Hungary-Poland-Czechoslovakia
Author: Designed by Lepage-Medvey
Publisher: Hyperion Press
City: ParisYear: 1939 (First Edition)Binding Style: Hardcover with dust jacket Illustrated: Yes
Book Details + Condition: 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, 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. 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. Please see below for more information on the pochoir process.
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.
