The Art Deco Book in France

Studies in Bibliography 55 (2002) 1-131

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The Art Deco Book in France

The 1985 Lyell Lectures

Gordon N. Ray

edited by G. Thomas Tanselle

Editor's Introduction

When Gordon Ray delivered the Lyell Lectures at Oxford in 1985, he chose as his subject the Art Deco book illustrations and bindings produced in France in the 1920s. This topic was not a surprising choice, for he had previously written magisterial annotated catalogues, largely based on his own collection , of British illustrated books from 1790 to 1914 and of French illustrated books from 1700 to 1914. His Lyell Lectures formed a natural continuation of the latter and gave him the opportunity to express his views on still another area in which, through his collecting and research, he had become expert. He accompanied his lectures with 183 slides, the majority of them in color, and those illustrations are in fact the reason that the lectures have not been published until now: the expense of producing so many illustrations was too daunting for the publishers that Ray approached.

Today a happy solution to this problem is available in the form of digital presentation on the internet, and Ray's work is now being offered in a combination of printed and electronic forms. The verbal text of his lectures is printed in the present volume (supplemented by eight plates, showing striking examples of the work of the major figures discussed), and all of the available illustrations are being published on the website of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, at {http://etext.virginia.edu/bsuva/artdeco}. Numbers placed in the margins of the lectures refer to these illustrations , which are correspondingly numbered on the website. (The online illustrations are provided with detailed captions, which are also printed in a numbered list following the text of the lectures.) One may profitably—and pleasurably—read these lectures without recourse to the illustrations. But naturally Ray's incisive judgments gain greater force when one can see what he is talking about, and the ready availability of the internet to most readers will, I trust, make the process of viewing the illustrations scarcely more burdensome than if they were presented as a section of plates in the present volume.

I

As matters turned out, Ray had only a year and a half to live after he delivered his Lyell Lectures, and they are his last major piece of work. Although they are not his masterpiece, they are certainly a triumphant and elegant coda to an astonishing body of work. And they reflect in mature form the subtlety of judgment and breadth of knowledge that he always displayed. Most of the audience at Ray's lectures in 1985 would have been aware of his distinction as a scholar and a collector and would have recognized his eminence as a statesman in the intellectual and cultural world. I think it is in order here, therefore, to sketch Ray's life and career, so as to provide present and future readers of these lectures with some sense of the personal background from which they emerged.

Gordon Norton Ray was born in New York City on 8 September 1915, the son of Jessie Norton and Jesse Gordon Ray (who represented an Indiana limestone company), and grew up on the Chicago north shore, graduating in 1932 from New Trier High School in Winnetka. Looking back, years later, on his education, he recalled that the excellence of New Trier caused him to regard some of the courses he took as a freshman at Indiana University as a disappointment. (He added that his undergraduate years preceded the dramatic rise of Indiana University under his friend Herman B Wells.) In 1932 his parents had moved to Bloomington, where both the university and their new company were located: the Independent Limestone Company had been founded in 1927, with his father as president, to quarry stone from the land owned by his mother's family. (It was income from this company that later...