Sunday March 30th.
Marche des Puces and Daumier

Lucky us, we get to to through Daylight Saving Time Lose An Hour - TWICE!

Today I decided to go back to Librairie de L'Avenue in the Marche des Puces at Saint Ouen. It's a large, permanent bookstore within the sprawling and amorphous collection of shops, stands, street vendors and opportunistic sidewalk sellers in this large flea market just outside of the northern boundary of Paris. It's one mile from our apartment.

I bought two large bound volumes of Figaro Illustré - a very upscale magazine that featured stories by Pierre Loti and Jules Verne, to name a few, and art by Toulouse Lautrec and other excellent, albeit less famous, artists. Lots of very early color lithography and great printing. I've seen individual pages on the web being offered for $75 or more - half what I paid for the two volumes. Oddly enough, the volumes consist of excerpts from various issues from 1890-1892 instead of complete issues, but here's just a small sample from the several HUNDRED pages in each.

In the center is the original publication of a short story by Jules Verne. To give you a notion of the scale, each page is 17 inches tall.

I was actually able to offset the cost of the volumes (a little) by selling one of the store employees a copy of ImageS for 14€. It helps to have something to sell for Euros here as the sad state of the dollar makes expensive things even MORE dear. Sigh. After buying the Figaro issues, I searched through the mazes of twisty little passages trying to find a store I had visited the previous week with Francisco San Millan. There's a million of these passages (see partial "map" below).

I finally had to phone Francisco for directions to the bookshop that turned out to be in the Marché Vernaison. When I arrived, I discovered that the book he was going to find for me (on Gustav Adolph Mossa - the artist in ImageS #9) had still not arrived but he knew that the cost would be 120€. Sadly, this was over my budget and I still have a lead on a copy for 100€ for my friend Kinuko Y. Craft. I WILL get you one, Kinuko!

I had to hurry home by way of the Metro - Porte de Clignancourt to Barbes-Richechouart to Place de Clichy to La Fourche (for those of you following along at home). Of course, I was going by the time on cell phone which I hadn't adjusted for Daylight Savings Time, so I was a bit late for the next item on our busy agenda. We had a 14h (that's 2PM for those who don't know) rendezvous with one of my ImageS subscribers. We were to meet Daniel DuClos at the Bibliothéque Nationale near the Bourse Metro station just north of the Musée du Louvre to see an exhibition of the lithographs of Honoré Daumier. We were only one half hour late and we were allowed to blame some of it on the rain.

It was a magnificent exhibition of printed copies of his work from the mid-to-late 1800s. Political satire, social commentary and, if you know your history, VERY turbulent times in France. Freedom of the Press was an on-again/off-again state and several of the displays were actual proof copies submitted to the censors for approval with the commentary of the reviewers. In three instances, they actually still had the lithographic stone with Daumier's drawings on them. We were fortunate to have Daniel with us to explain many of the captions. What struck us all as unbelievable was just how APT many of these drawings are STILL. In one drawing, two men are plastering up political posters for opposing parties and they are wondering aloud why ANYONE would still believe all the promises on the placards. The other replies that he doesn't understand either, but it sure seems to work over and over again. Hmmm?

Afterwards was some café at a nearby brasserie in out of the rain and home.

I went out to get some food, since we eat very much in the Parisian style whereby we purchase and consume food for one day and shop regularly. I went down to Le Fournil des Saveurs (see above), one of our favorite Patissieres and got a baguette and some "saveurs" for dessert. Then I continued on down Rue Legendre to one of the Boucheries on Avenue de Saint Ouen to get some smoked sausages and some few different patés to accompany the bread. Then it was back home to an excellent period of recovery for my very sore ankle. It was a busy day.

I looked through my new volumes of Figaro and rested my feet as we partook of the rewards from my hunting and gathering.