Grosses Bêtes & Petites Bêtes, iBooks Edition

In this delightful and oddly contemporary-appearing book, first published in Paris in 1912, the author and illustrator André Hellé used hand-lettered, lithographed text, and line drawings  enhanced by twenty mounted pochoir (stencilled and hand colored) illustrations. The pochoir plates are signed with the author/artist's monogram: lower case initials ah inside a circle; dots for eyes and an underderlined mouth create a face. Its original covers were of corrugated boards, and the cover art is a mounted chromolithograph. Printed endpapers have a Noah's Ark motif. "André Hellé...has worked not so much in terms of simplified lines...as in plain masses represented by blotches of bright colour....in his "Arche de Noé,"... The publisher, Tolmer...stencilled the illustrations...in large format. None of Hellé's colour effects were lost, and the animals stand boldly silhouetted like toys."                                           - Esther Averill, 1931 This eBook edition was based upon a  copy from the library of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, scanned by the Library of Congress.