Marc Elder / Gabriel-Belot - Cœurs fragiles [1/160 num.] - 1928

Original edition of this short story by Marc Elder, adorned with thirty-eight woodcuts designed and engraved by Gabriel-Belot.

One of the 160 numbered copies at the expense of the Société de la Gravure sur Bois original (no. 3)

Brown foolscap folders with reinforced tabs.
Light creases on the cover, impeccable interior. A copy in excellent, fresh condition.

Fragile Hearts is the third work in the series of 'unpublished short stories' edited by Léon Comar for the editions of the Société de la gravure sur bois originale (active from 1911 to 1935).

Painter, illustrator, and prolific engraver, Gabriel Belot published in 1917 the work The Ile Saint-Louis, for which he alone created the text, illustrations, typography, printing, and binding. His friend Marc Elder dedicated a monograph to him in 1927, published by Delpeuch: 'There is no doubt about the kinship between [Gabriel Belot] and the image-cutters of the Middle Ages. He belongs to their lineage both in his way of understanding and executing. He is a Gothic, in flesh, bone, and spirit, who revives beyond more than five hundred years of Latin culture. One should not seek other masters for him than those unknowns who planted oxen on the towers of Laon, unfurled at the walls of Vézelay, Chartres, Reims, Paris, Bourges, this heroic stone saga where the temporal liberation of a people and the highest soaring of their soul can be read' (Gabriel-Belot, painter of images, p. 56).

Marc Elder / Gabriel-Belot
Fragile hearts [1/160 num.]
Paris, At the expense of the Society of Original Woodcut Engraving, 1928
in-4 (28 x 20 cm); 18 pages. 2 figures.