La Vie au Grand Air: Revue Illustrée de Tous les Sports. Year I, no. 1 (n.d., April 1898) through Year X, no. 484 (28 December, 1907).
The first ten years, housed in 15 volumes (lacking 1905 volume I and 1907 volume I), of the French illustrated sports and leisure journal, under the editorial direction of Pierre Lafitte, composed primarily of photomontages and photo essays with captions and other small amounts of text, with occasional drawings and cartoons, on a wide range of sports and leisure activities, including automobiles, tennis, soccer, swimming, sailing, rowing, fencing, boxing, cycling, ballooning, and horseback riding, most issues with beautifully photographed covers, each issue also containing a page or so of advertisements. Profusely illustrated. Sm. folio. 3/4 leather with marbled boards, original self-wrpps. bound in. Some volumes with minor soiling and bumping along spines, one with losses to back cover. Paris (Pierre Lafitte & Co.) 1898-1907.
La Vie au Grand Air was published weekly from April 1898 through April 15, 1922, with an interruption in publication during the war years, from August 2, 1914 to June 15, 1916. Under Lafitte's artistic direction, the journal was groundbreaking in its use of photography and imaginative and illustrative photographic layouts. In the December 24, 1903 issue, the question of who will win a wrestling competition is addressed with the photographs of eight contenders laid out in a question mark on the page. In a February 1904 issue, a photographic essay on motorboats is illustrated with photographs cropped to the shapes of propeller blades. These types of layouts were not yet widely used at the turn of the century. Scarce institutionally.
Book ID: 48337
Price: $9,500.00