Octave Uzanne

Portrait of 1894 by A. Brauer from the Album Mariani

Louis Octave Uzanne (14 September 1851 – 31 October 1931), known as Octave Uzanne, was a 19th-century French bibliophile, non-fiction writer, publisher and journalist.

Biography

Born in Auxerre, of a bourgeois family, he came to Paris after his father's death. At first he studied at the upper-class Collège Rollin in Paris, then during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 was attached to a school at Richmond in England.[1] Continuing with law studies, he abandoned this line of work when he came into an inheritance in 1872. He became a regular visitor of the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, where he formed part of a group of followers of the former librarian Charles Nodier, together with journalist Charles Monselet, writer Loredan Larchey, and author and bibliophile Paul Lacroix. He also joined the Société des Amis des Livres, the first French bibliophilic association.[2]

At the start of his career, Uzanne focused on the lesser-known writers of the 18th century, with 4 volumes of work published by Jouast, and an additional 20+ volumes published by Albert Quantin. He was an admirer of the Goncourt brothers, who also wrote on 18th-century France. While looking backwards for his subjects, he was very up-to-date for the technical side of the printing and publishing. His 1879 work Le bric-à-brac de l'amour was one of the first to employ the gillotage, a Zincography technique, and photomechanical reproduction.[2]

After leaving the Société des Amis des Livres, which he deemed as too conservative and too concerned with the re-edition of older works, he started two new bibliographic societies, the Societé des Bibliophiles Contemporaines (1889–1894) and the Societé des Bibliophiles Indépendants (1896–1901). The first one consisted of 160 people, including writers Jules Claretie and Jean Richepin, artists Albert Robida and Paul Avril, and journalist and critic Francisque Sarcey.[2] Uzanne also edited two magazines, Conseiller du bibliophile (1876–1877) and Les Miscellanées Bibliographiques (1878–1880), and then ran three consecutive bibliophilic revues: Le Livre: Bibliographie Moderne (1880–1889), Le Livre Moderne: Revue du Monde Littéraire et des Bibliophiles Contemporaines (1890–1891), and L'Art et l'Idée: Revue Contemporaine du Dilettantisme Littéraire et de la Curiosité (1892–1893).[3] In the early 1890s, he was considered to be "[...] the best authority that book lovers know on subjects specially interesting to book lovers".[4]

In contrast to the common bibliophiles of his time, he was most interested in the creation of new, luxurious bibliophile works, collaborating closely with printers, binders, typographers and artists (especially the Symbolists and early Art Nouveau artists). One of the main artists collaborating with Uzanne was the Belgian Félicien Rops, who illustrated some of his books and created the cover illustration for Le Livre Moderne, and who called Octave Uzanne "the Bibliophile's dream".[5] The overall quality of Uzanne's books was remarked upon by the New York Times when reviewing his 1894 work La Femme à Paris: "The book is a highly-artistic achievement in a typographical sense[...] This artistic element and the style of the author [...] elevate the work from its sphere of usefulness into the sphere of pure literature. It will be serviceable a century from now to students of our civilization."[6]

Portrait of Uzanne by Félix Vallotton, 1892

His collection of contemporary bibliophilic books was sold in 1894 by Hôtel Drouot. It contained some of the finest examples of late 19th-century French bookbinding, by binders like Charles Meunier, Lucien Magnin, Pétrus Ruban, Camille Martin, René Wiener and Victor Prouvé.[2]

Uzanne was also well known in the literary circles of his day, as attested by this poem from the Vers de circonstance from Stéphane Mallarmé from 1920:

Non comme pour étinceler

Aux immortels dos de basane
Tard avec mon laisser-aller

je vous salue, Octave Uzanne[7]
(Not as if to sparkle with mirth

at the immortal sheepskin spines
late with my usual sloppiness

I greet you, Octave Uzanne)

As a journalist, sometimes employing the pseudonym "la Cagoule", Uzanne wrote for L'Écho de Paris and other newspapers,[5] including a collaboration with Edouard Drumont on his antisemitic newspaper La Libre Parole, and for other French and foreign magazines like The Studio[2] and Scribner's Magazine, for which he wrote in 1894 an article about The End of Books which he thought would come because of the upcoming phonography,[8] predicting the rise of radio and television.[9] Uzanne was fascinated by modern technology and the possibilities it offered for the reproduction and dissemination of words, sounds, and images, which wasn't only evidenced in that article or in his groundbreaking work in book publishing, but also in an article he wrote in 1893 for the French newspaper Le Figaro, about a visit he made to Thomas Edison, where he witnessed the Kinetograph shortly before it went public.[10]

Another interest of Uzanne was female fashion, about which he wrote a number of books and articles, which were also translated in English,[11] and more specifically the image of the Parisienne, the women of Paris.[12] His 1898 work Monument esthématique du XIXe siècle: Les Modes de Paris, translated as Fashions in Paris, was according to the review in the New York Times "[...]the most complete and exhaustive work on the subject of French fashions that has yet appeared".[13]

He died at Saint-Cloud on 31 October 1931.[1]

Bibliography

Cover of L'éventail, 1882 book by Uzanne with art by Paul Avril.
Title page of The Mirror of the World

Uzanne also contributed notes, forewords or commentary to a number of other books.

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Pierre Juhel, "Octave Uzanne : sa revue L'Art et l'Idée en 1892", Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire de l'Art français (année 2003), 2004, p. 350.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Silverman, Willa Z. (2008). The new bibliopolis: French book collectors and the culture of print, 1880–1914. University of Toronto Press. p. 312. ISBN 978-0-8020-9211-3. Retrieved 3 February 2011.
  3. ↑ "Octave Uzanne – The eminent French author now in this town". New York Times. 12 April 1893. Retrieved 8 February 2011.
  4. ↑ "Book lovers of New York". New York Times. 26 November 1893. Retrieved 8 February 2011.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Silverman, Willa Z. (2004). "Books worthy of our era?". Book History (The Johns Hopkins University Press) 7: 239–284. doi:10.1353/bh.2004.0025. JSTOR 30227363.
  6. ↑ "Women of To-day in Paris". New York Times. 28 January 1894. Retrieved 8 February 2011.
  7. ↑ Zwerling Sugano, Marian (1992). The Poetics of the Occasion: Mallarmé and the Poetry of Circumstance. Stanford University Press. p. 272. ISBN 978-0-8047-1946-9. Retrieved 7 February 2011.
  8. ↑ Thorburn, David (2004). Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. MIT Press. p. 81. ISBN 978-0-262-70107-5. Retrieved 8 February 2011.
  9. ↑ Chambers, Ellie (2000). Contemporary themes in humanities higher education. Springer. p. 110. ISBN 978-0-7923-6694-2. Retrieved 8 February 2011.
  10. ↑ Convents, Guido (2000). Van kinetoscoop tot café-ciné: de eerste jaren van de film in België, 1894–1908 (in Dutch). Leuven University Press. p. 39. ISBN 978-90-5867-057-1. Retrieved 8 February 2011.
  11. ↑ Tiersten, Lisa (2001). Marianne in the market: envisioning consumer society in fin-de-siècle France. University of California Press. p. 321. ISBN 978-0-520-22529-9. Retrieved 7 February 2011.
  12. ↑ Harrison, Charles (1998). Art in theory, 1815–1900: an anthology of changing ideas. Wiley-Blackwell. p. 1097. ISBN 978-0-631-20066-6. Retrieved 7 February 2011.
  13. ↑ "Uzanne's "Fashions in Paris"". New York Times. 22 October 1898. Retrieved 8 February 2011.

External links

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