Jules Lemaître; Job - ABC. Petits contes - 1919

ABC. Little Tales, by Jules Lemaître, of the French Academy, with illustrations by Job

ABC. Little Tales is an illustrated alphabet book whose text was written by Jules Lemaître (Vennecy, April 27, 1853 – Tavers, August 5, 1914), drama critic, writer, academicien since 1895 and member of the Académie française. Lemaître began composing these tales in the summer of 1913, in Royan, strolling among the pines and the sea, and tested them in the evenings before the children of his friend Myriam Harry – who mischievously related their reactions in her preface. The tales were conceived on an alphabetical principle: each text takes for its title a word whose initial letter is a letter of the alphabet – A for Donkey, B for Aries, C for Duck, up to Z for Zero –, freely inspired by Andersen, Florian, Canon Schmid, or the author's own invention. A few days after entrusting the proofs to Myriam Harry for correction, Lemaître died of a heart attack, on August 5, 1914, on the first day of the Great War. Publication was suspended for the duration of the conflict and could only appear in 1919, five years after the author's death.

Job is the pseudonym of Jacques-Marie-Gaston Onfroy de Bréville (Bar-le-Duc, 1858 – Paris, 1931), one of the great French illustrators of the Belle Époque and of the interwar period. Universally known for his depictions of the Napoleonic epic and of colorful historical periods – his illustrations for the Mémoires and for the reconstructions of battles adorned generations of school manuals – he reveals in this alphabet book a very different facet of his talent: meticulous and poetic, he makes each letter a true calligraphic initial, and accompanies each tale with colored illustrations of a lightness and tenderness that are perfect. Animals, toys, children, characters from tales – ibises, kangaroos, nightingales – are rendered with a pen that is both precise and airy. The work remains one of his most appreciated achievements in the realm of children's literature.

The album is presented in large 4to (about 24.5 × 30 cm) of 54 pages, without date (1919), in an illustrated colored publisher’s binding with a red cloth spine, featuring a color frontispiece and numerous color illustrations and initials in the text by Job. Binding rubbed and stained, joints of the spine partly split, two tears in the back cloth and losses on the headcaps. Various fingerprints and stains inside, and a few small lines in black pencil.