Babar’s dream (and framing books)
October 22, 2001 | Ed Brewer
3 Comment(s)
I am very interested in finding a copy suitable for framing of Babar’s Dream by Jean de Brunhoff on pages 128-129 of Visual Explanations. Can you direct me to a source for a print I have not been able to locate one. EB
Topics: Art
As far as I know, there is no print available. However, just obtain the original book, which is very large format, open to the Babar’s Dream double-page spread and frame it in a frame with a thick mat making a thin box to hold the thin book. A good framer can do this. (Or you can remove and frame the double-page spread itself.)
The edition you want is Jean de Brunhoff, Le Roi Babar (Paris, 1933).
And there is of course the English translation by Laurent de Brunhoff (son of Jean) and Phyllis Rose done for my book Visual Explanations at page 127.
I bought the English translation and had a framer do as ET suggested and remove the two-page image of Babar’s Dream and frame it. It worked fine, although the shades of orange in the background of the left and right sides of the images were different, creating an obvious color boundary down the middle of the framed result. But I display it proudly anyway.
I might suggest that the framing of books is something that we might consider more often.
A while ago, I acquired, for a song, an exhibition catalog for one of the first (if not the first) US exhibitions for Lyonel Feininger. The frontspiece was an image from the show that appeared to have been printed using one of Feininger’s woodcut blocks.
I wanted to frame it, so that I and others might admire it more than we would if it were just sitting on a shelf. I briefly considered extricating it from the catalog. (Really. Stop looking at me like that. I didn’t actually follow through.) Then, someone suggested that I frame the whole thing. It required a rather large mat to fit the catalog, but preserves both the book and the work of art.