From the exhibition
Front Cover, *Un Autre Monde*
J.J. Grandville · 1844

This is the book as object: a publisher's binding in deep blue cloth, its ornament stamped in gilt and touched with color. A ribbon-banner carries the title across the top. At the center, two costumed figures, a party-colored harlequin and a woman in a bright skirt, step hand in hand across a small globe crowded with grotesque little beasts, while sun and moon peer from the upper corners. *Un Autre Monde* appeared in installments through 1844, and even its cover advertises the premise: a second world, adjacent to ours and populated by the strange. Grandville, born Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard in 1803, made his name animating the inanimate and dressing animals as men. The binding promises a guided tour of that place, and the plates inside deliver a dream logic later cartoonists would recognize as their own.
J.J. Grandville Public domain