TOPFFER (Rodolphe). Histoire de Mr. Crépin - Mr. Jabot - Les - Lot 140

TOPFFER (Rodolphe). Histoire de Mr. Crépin - Mr. Jabot - Les Amours de Mr. Vieux Bois. P., Aubert, s. d. (1847). Set of 3 oblong in-8 albums, blue long-grain half-maroq, corners, ornate spines, n. r., ill. covers (Mercier, Cuzin's successor). COMPLETE REUNION of Töpffer's three entirely autographed albums, first published in France by Aubert. Mr. Crépin comprises 171 drawings and captions, Mr. Jabot 154 and Les Amours de Mr. Vieux Bois 198. We had to wait until 1833, and Rodolphe Töpffer's first book as principal of a boarding school, to read the first sentence that would give comic strips their start: "Go, little book, and choose your world, for to foolish things, he who does not laugh, yawns; he who does not surrender, resists; he who reasons, misunderstands; and he who does not want to remain serious, is master of them." This is the story behind Histoire de M. Jabot, which can be said to be the ancestor or precursor of the comic strip. Rodolphe Töpffer was the principal of a boarding school in Geneva, and to entertain his pupils, he devised stories that combined drawing and text. Since nature abhors a vacuum, he called this "literature in prints". The equation is simple: the text illustrates the drawing and vice versa. Thierry Groensteen, theorist and historian of the comic strip, notes that: "The Töpfferian albums embody a major break in the tradition of pictorial narratives, and truly found a new genre: the one we now call the 'comic strip'. VERY GOOD EXAMPLES FROM THE P. VILLEBOEUF LIBRARY (bookplate). (worn hinges and covers).