Exceptional, all colours bright and unfaded. rubbing to edges and corners of boards and some spotting to edges, endpapers soiled, but internally fine, the colours astonishingly bright. With the business card of the Berger-Levrault company loosely tipped in.
Robert Steinheil was an accomplished art-printer and managing director of the Berger-Levrault company, one of the largest printing companies in France at the time and one of the most technically sophisticated (being both the first printers to use cast iron presses in France, and the first to use photocomposition in Europe, in 1957); they were responsible for many of the illustrated children's books printed during the First World War and Steinheil was often directly involved as editor, as in the case of En Guerre!.
The first book illustrated by Charlotte Schaller and an early example of the kind of patriotic illustrated children's book which would become common as the war dragged on. Here, Schaller uses the pochoir technique of hand-colouring through stencils to illustrate a surreal reimagining of the war as seen through the eyes of children playing with toy soldiers in the garden; a Brobdingnagian German boot falls from the sky to crush a legion of Belgian soldiers, the battlefield of the Marne becomes a game of skittles, and children ride at the head of an army atop rocking horses. A visually striking book, but thoroughly imbued with an uncritical nationalistic fervour which causes a deep unease at the thought of the horrors of war which were yet to come.
Unlike others we have seen, this copy is printed on Japanese vellum, which can presumably be explained by it being something of a deluxe variant produced for presentation, but whether this was a one-off or one of a number of special copies is not clear. The Japanese vellum lends a particular richness to the pochoir colouring, making the colours both darker in tone and increasing their saturation; the brushstrokes also become more easily identifiable, which can be most easily seen on p.21, 'Combat Aérien'. .