"Books Worthy of Our Era?" Octave Uzanne, Technology, and the Luxury Book in Fin-de-Siecle France

Renovata resurgo [Renewed, I rise again].

—Motto appearing on Uzanne's first publications

"Octave Uzanne, the Bibliophile's dream!"¹ (Figure 1). So exclaimed the Belgian Symbolist painter Félicien Rops (1833-98) when describing his friend, a paragon of bibliophilia in fin-de-siècle France. During an era of intense bibliophilic activity spanning the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, Uzanne (1851-1931) was passionately and prodigiously engaged with the printed word as an author (more than fifty volumes of fiction and criticism), journalist (regular contributions to L'Echo de Paris and numerous other French and foreign periodicals),² bibliographer, and ad hoc publisher. He founded three influential reviews devoted to the book: Le Livre: Bibliographie moderne (1880-89), Le Livre Moderne (1890-91), and L'Art et l'Idée: Revue contemporaine du dilettantisme littéraire et de la curiosité (1892-93). A habitué of bibliophile societies, he ran two of his own, the Société des Bibliophiles Contemporains (1889-94) and the Société des Bibliophiles Indépendants (1896-1901). Breaking with the tradition of antiquarian, retrospective bibliophilia solidly established in France, Uzanne cast himself as a reformer, proclaiming that "the future and success will belong to innovators."³ He called for change in all matters concerning the luxury book, especially in illustration, binding, and typography. This ally of the Symbolist poets and painters became the foremost herald of a new type of bibliophilia, one that privileged close collaboration between artists, authors, publishers, and collectors to create illustrated editions of modern texts.

Among the many themes of Uzanne's work is a concern for the effects of technology on book production. Superficially at least, he seemed optimistic about the many possibilities for creativity afforded by technological advances. He relentlessly championed what he referred to as "the pretty things of modern industry" (Cb112) when applied to book production. These "pretty things" were featured prominently at the 1894 Exposition internationale du livre moderne et des industries du papier, held at the Palais de l'Industrie in Paris. They included color illustrations, machine-made bindings, and chemically tinted paper. Such novelties exemplified the technological changes that had been radically transforming the book trade throughout the nineteenth century to meet the demands of the burgeoning market for print. Printing presses, for example, had become more complex machines over the course of the century. Hippolyte Marinoni's rotary press was introduced in France around 1866, coinciding with the replacement of rag-based by wood pulp-based paper, to print twenty thousand copies per hour of the popular daily newspaper, Le Petit Journal. Completed by Ottmar Mergenthaler's linotype and Tolbert Lanston's monotype machines (debuting in France at the 1889 and 1900 World's Fairs, respectively), these inventions contributed to the phenomenal increase in the volume of printed matter over the course of the century and assured the virtual disappearance of the manual Gutenbergian atelier.

Uzanne valued the increasing sophistication of printing processes and other such technological innovations. But he did so only insofar as they helped advance an elitist aesthetic of the book based on originality, novelty, and fantasy. He disparaged technology's potential to replicate, leading to overproduction and (worse, in his view) democratization of the type of livre d'amateur he envisioned. He was, in fact, a peculiar herald, whose desire for reform coexisted with conservative, even reactionary, leanings. His elitism led him, in the end, to advocate two strategies for producers of fine books in this age of mechanical reproduction. The first entailed appropriating the most modern technologies but in ever more singular ways, for the exclusive benefit of a select clientele of collectors. The second also encouraged innovation, not by technological means but by a return to