Jan 29, 2019 - Sale 2497
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Sale 2497 - Lot 128

Price Realized: $ 8,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
(JOUVE, PAUL; and FRANÇOIS-LOUIS SCHMIED.) Kipling, Rudyard. Le Livre [et le Second Livre] de la Jungle. Translated into French by Louis Fabulet and Robert D'Humières. Illustrated with with 130 color wood engravings, including 17 hors text full-page plates by Paul Jouve engraved by Schmied, some heightened in gold and/or silver. Thick 4to, loose as issued in original pictorial wrappers and glassine dust jacket, fine; internally clean with bright plates except for occasional marginal foxing, mostly relegated to first few signatures. Paris: Société du Livre Contemporain, 1919
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number 63 of 125 press-numbered copies created and printed for members of le livre contemporain, the exclusive French literary group, that had desired a translation of Kipling's bestseller as early as 1905. This copy for M.M. Méric. By 1910 the project was in motion, but while Jouve was chosen to illustrate it, he was not so adept at color wood engravings, the medium they desired, so he suggested that his friend, François-Louis Schmied, the master of the style, was better qualified to execute the engravings after Jouve's drawings. After five years, over ninety illustrations, and a thousand blocks, the printing was halted because of World War I. When the initial printer, Philippe Renouard, could not complete the printing, Schmied took over, finishing in 1919, and thus developed his skills as an artist and printer which launched him into the era of the "livre de luxe" during the 1920s when he would create numerous masterworks. Ritchie 4.