First edition of this work considered to be Grandville's masterpiece, with illustrations in first print.
Illustrated frontispiece, 36 colored illustrations and 146 in-text woodcuts in black.
Contemporary binding in blue half glazed calf, sunned spine with gilt arabesques, small holes at foot of spine, marbled paper boards, mould made endpapers and flyleaves, speckled edges.
This exuberant and prodigious production of Grandville and Delord (whose name is printed at the bottom of page 292), judged by its contemporaries as already being mad, was rediscovered by the Surrealists.
"Published in 1844 by éditions Fournier, Un autre monde is Grandville's masterpiece. The book is subtitled Transformations, visions, incarnations, ascensions, locomotions, explorations, travels, excursions, stations, cosmogonies, phantasmagorias, dreams, frolics, facetiae, whims, metamorphosis, zoomorphs, lithomorphosis, metempsychosis, apotheosis and other things. With its transformations, its inventions and its phantasmagoria, the work claims to reflect a changing era. Un autre monde recounts and illustrates the extraordinary travels of three neo-gods, Puff, Krackq and Hahblle. [...] It is indeed a philosophical journey that Grandville takes us on [...] The reader, led to a strange planet imagined by the artist, is invited, like Gulliver in the Country of Laputa, on a parodic journey of his philosophical, scientific, economic and religious ideas, of his passions, inventions and worries: romanticism, mechanisation, socialism, money, serial, publicity, anglomania, philanthropy, phrenology, etc." (Annie Renonciat, La Vie et l'œuvre de Grandville, Paris, ACR-Vilo, 1985).
Grandville's most sought-after work.