La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France

La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France) is a collaborative artists' book by Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay-Terk. The book features a poem by Cendrars about a journey through Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express in 1905, during the first Russian Revolution, interlaced with an almost-abstract pochoir print by Delaunay-Terk. The work, published in 1913, is considered a milestone in the evolution of artist's books as well as modernist poetry and abstract art.

The publisher of a 2008 reprint of the book has called it "one of the most beautiful books ever created". Cendrars himself referred to the work as ‘a sad poem printed on sunlight’.

Blaise Cendrars was the nom-de-plume for Fréderic Louis Sauser, a play on Braise (ember) and Cendres (ash); 'writing is being burned alive, but it also means being reborn from the ashes'. Born in Switzerland, at 15 he had run away from home to train as an apprentice jeweller in St Petersburg, but continued to travel, including an important stay in New York where he wrote his first major poem Les Pâques à New York, 1912, before settling in Paris.

Once in Paris, he started a small press, Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux (New Man Editions) with the help of an anarchist who owned a clandestine printing press at the Mouzaïa Quarter, 19th arrondissement. His first edition, 125 copies of Les Pâques à New York, was published October 1912. Despite failing to sell a single copy, he pressed ahead with the second book, La prose du Transsibérien, published June 1913 (see 1913 in poetry). Intended as an edition of 150, only 60 copies were printed, of which about 30 are thought to survive. The book, a series of 4 sheets glued together in an accordion-style binding, measures 199 cm tall when unfolded; the height of all 150 end to end would have equalled the height of the Eiffel Tower, a potent symbol of modernity at the time, and referenced in both the poem and the print.

...
Wikipedia