Start

La Fin Des Livres

by Albert Robida and Octave Uzanne

The End Of Books

A prognostication from the past

[Illustration]

Introduction

In 1895 Octave Uzanne and Albert Robida published, in France, Contes pour les Bibliophiles (“Stories for Bibliophiles”). The eleven stories in Contes, all revolving around books (or at least printing) are interesting, bizarre, weird… one could go on in true Fanthorpian fashion. But even better than the stories are the illustrations by Albert Robida.

Robida was born in 1848 and died in 1926. During his lifetime he reportedly drew 60,000 pictures and wrote and/or illustrated over 200 books. His first published work came out in 1866, and he appeared in “La Vie Parisienne,” as well as journals less well-known to the world outside France. One of his works, La Guerre au XXe Siècle (1887) is of some interest in the field of science-fictional treatments of future wars, and is the subject of current papers and a critical edition by I. F. Clarke in Britain.

Robida is forgotten (or was never known) in America, but in France he is remembered. His sketches and caricatures, particularly of humorous and satirical visions of what lay in the future, were decades ahead of their time. Disney adopted some of his drawings as backgrounds for their views of the future at a pavilion at Epcot, and web sites attempt today to bring some of his best work back into circulation.

If Robida is mostly forgotten, Uzanne can be truly said to have vanished from the cultural consciousness of the world. Yet he was well known as a writer and critic of his day, and some of his works command high prices from rare-book dealers. One presumes that much of his work was more bound to the circumstances of the current day than were the drawings of Robida, whose art has a certain timelessness to it (even where it graphically predicts a future that demonstrably did not happen).

What follows is one of the pieces from Contes. Writing and drawing in 1894, Uzanne and Robida give us predictions of a post-literate society. Music and speech are everywhere! Newspapers are forgotten, and news presenters are valued for their emotional tone instead of the accuracy of their reporting. Recordings combined with cinema present costumed drama and humor in the home. (This is 1894, remember; Edison had truly just begun to produce his films.)

Printed books are over and done with! They are no longer needed. As some companies Hidden Knowledge, for example) begin to create electronic books that will never be published in printed form, we need to remember… it was all predicted more than a hundred years ago.

[Illustration]

Notes on the re-creation of “The End of Books”

The original drawings in the collection Contes pour les Bibliophiles were scanned as black-and-white drawings at 600 dpi, and cleaned up in Photoshop. The drawings were extracted and processed individually to reduce their file size and improve their visual presentation on computer screens. The text was run through Textbridge 9, which did a surprisingly good job at OCR.

The HTML layout merges the recovered text and the processed images back together again, and is designed to approximate that of the original. It is impossible to imitate it exactly, for all browser configurations, in HTML. You can do it in PDF; we looked at conversion to PDF but decided to keep things simple. One hopes also that future XML layout tools will provide this capability.

The original is in French, and providing a proper translation is outside the scope of this project. I wrote a summary in English for those us of who do not have the French language. Or see the “Scribner’s Magazine” references below.

I have no idea what was originally written as the last word in the caption of the drawing of Gutenberg and the devil. It appears to have been scratched off the printing plate.

Contes pour les Bibliophiles was noted in “The Century Magazine” (May, 1895, page 354 ff.) in a review section on “Books in Paper Covers.” I say noted; but actually, only the cover was reviewed. The cover was reproduced in a photoengraving in “Century” and its artistic values were denigrated; the contents apparently remained unread. Perhaps they were unhappy because Uzanne ocasionally appeared in English in “Scribner’s Magazine”, which competed fiercely with “Century”.

The story itself appeared in a clumsy English translation in “Scribner’s”, Vol. 16 (1894), pp 221-231, with illustrations by Robida — some the same as those in the collection Contes, and some different. A few of those used in both places were printed more clearly in the magazine, but most were reproduced badly in the magazine and are clearer in the collection Contes. The page images are on the web in both JPEG and GIF format at Dave Price’s website at Oxford

Another place to see this on the web, with a different set of JPEG images of the “Scribner’s” pages, is at the University of Kent at Canterbury, which also has an HTML of the whole piece with the artwork located in approximately the right places (but of questionable size), and an HTML version with the art left out.

A fabulous resource for anyone interested in the history of American magazines (or American history in general) is the MOA project at Cornell. They have put up on the web full-page images of the complete editorial contents of long runs of 19C magazines. “Scribner’s” is included; at MOA you can see what else was in the same issue with this piece. Unfortunately, their reproduction of the i llustrations is very bad, either because of their imaging methodology or because they were working from bad microforms. Also, it has always been common for libraries to discard the covers and ads from magazines before binding them, to save money and shelf space. Today we find the ads and cover illustrations generally more interesting than the stories and features. Most of the volumes at MOA lack the ads and covers. Such is life.

To find out more about Albert Robida and Octave Uzanne:

“Albert Robida’s Imperfect Future” in “History Today,” July 1998. (I have not yet seen this article myself.)

A page describing the “Association of the Friends of Albert Robida”, (_Les Amis_) with links to some of his drawings on the web.

Some interesting pages at pansophist.com display Albert Robida illlustrations, as used by Disney at the recently closed Horizons pavilion (1983-99) at Epcot: Introduction and Follow-on.

A different piece by Uzanne, also from “Scribner’s”, (1892, p. 558) can also be found at the MOA project: “Conversations and Opinions of Victor Hugo - from Unpublished Papers Found at Guernsey”. Yet another is “The Arts Relating to Women, and their Exhibition in Paris” (Vol. 13 (1893), page 503). You should be able to go directly to the “Scribner’s” volumes at MOA.

_All of the URL’s given above are subject to sudden and unexpected change! The web is dynamic, changing, upredictable, and sometimes unreliable. They were tested, updated, and working correctly on 31 July