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In 1934 the Paris art world was in a ferment of Surrealism. Salvador Dal� was at the height of his powers. Everyone was delving into the subconscious. One artist, Andr� Villeboeuf (1893-1956), published in that year a remarkable album of 16 Surrealist etchings, entitled Lubies (Whims, or Whimsies). 26 copies were published "Aux d�pens des Cinq-Vingt". I have copy 25, which was Villeboeuf's own. Each etching is signed, justified and titled in pencil, but low down the sheet rather than directly below the image. The etchings are printed on Hollande van Gelder wove paper, presumably by the artist himself, as no printer is mentioned. These etchings look beyond the modish self-regard of the Surrealists to locate the surreal in a long artistic tradition. There are touches in them of the grotesqueries of Hieronymous Bosch, the absurd animal/human hybrids of J.J. Grandville, even the fairy fantasies of Richard Doyle. But the artist they reference most is the one Andr� Villeboeuf

On Friday I took a magical mystery tour of London by Routemaster bus, conducted by typographers Phil Baines and Catherine Dixon, whose knowledge of London's public lettering is unparalleled.  Along the way we scorned the "mean serifs" of the inscription on the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour, admired the fantastic Victorian storefront of James Smith & Sons (Umbrellas) Ltd in New Oxford Street, and learned that the windows spelling out OXO on the iconic Oxo Tower were a cunning way of bypassing a ban on advertising on the riverfront. This enchanting experience would have prompted me to post on the shopfronts of London and Paris in the parallel art of Eric Ravilious and Lucien Boucher, but I've already done that here . So instead I shall leap from the Oxo Tower in London to the Martini Tower in Brussels, as seen by the artist Laure Malcl�s-Masereel. This modernist masterpiece with its distinctly 1960s sanserif lettering was pulled down in 2001-2002, the

I�ve mentioned the etcher, lithographer and painter �douard Joseph Goerg in several previous posts, but never really focussed on his work. Born in Sydney, Australia in 1893, to French parents (his father was a champagne merchant, with whose bourgeois ethos �douard remained deeply at odds), Goerg was a very powerful artist, whose distorted figures and phantasmagorical compositions express a deep-seated sense of dread and apprehension. Goerg�s anguished soul is reflected in the texts he chose to illustrate, which include Dante�s L�Enfer (1950, etchings), Villiers de l�Isle Adam�s Nouveau contes cruels (1946, colour lithographs), and the Apocalypse (1945, black and white lithographs). �douard Goerg, lithograph for Baudelaire, 1947-52 Goerg�s majestic two-volume edition of Baudelaire�s poems, Les Fleurs du Mal (1948) and Tableaux Parisiens (1952) is often cited as his major work. It�s certainly a monumental achievement, containing 269 monochrome lithographs, all designed to surround an