Hergé :

Hergé : Tintin, blanco cover of the album "Tintin au Congo" in its original "Petit Vingtième" edition of 1931, with graphite illustrations. Certificate of authenticity from the Hergé committee enclosed. Dimensions : 48 x 31 cm. A prestige piece beyond the albums At first glance, and unless you're particularly knowledgeable about publishing, this object could pass for what's known as a "blotter", a banal desk accessory on which to place the page you're writing or the drawing you're working on. Some writers' or artists' desk blotters are, by their very nature, works of art and can therefore be considered museum pieces... This object doesn't claim such a status, but it does have a number of special features that should attract the attention of collectors of Tintin albums. It is what bibliophiles call a "blanco" element, a simulation of the result.//R////R//Une couverture blanco When a publishing project takes shape, the publisher can obtain from his printer either a "blanco cover", or a "blanco volume", produced on the paper and in the format chosen, with the same number of pages as the planned work. We don't know whether the first Tintin albums benefited from a "volume blanco" that would have been made available to Abbé Wallez, the publisher. We do know, however, that Hergé received at least one "blanco cover", and the one shown here is not just any cover. The green cloth linking the two plates reveals to tintinophiles that it was intended as the cover for Tintin in the Congo in its original 1931 edition. A desk blotter located and identified Last, but not least, the object was later used for a long time as Hergé's desk blotter. Precisely at the time when he was creating The Black Island, in 1937-1938, as evidenced by these pencilled elements, almost erased but always identifiable: the plane of the counterfeiters sketched twice, an image of Tintin walking and, above all, the multiple representations of horse-guard grenadiers in furry caps or British police Bobbies that surround him. In the midst of this tangle, we'll be surprised to discover on numerous occasions the name (elegantly handwritten in capitals) of Spirou (Le Petit Vingtième's rival weekly, launched on April 21, 1938) and the name of a famous Brussels decorating firm (Vanderborght) that Georges Remi probably commissioned. A temporary collection of ideas Finally, the underlined word "idées" (ideas) affixed by the artist to the middle of one of the two plates seems to indicate that, after having served as a blotter for the creator of Tintin, the object may have served as a collection of notes or ideas before he decided to record them in a smaller notebook, bearing the explicit title: Tintin - Ideas. A piece of evidence Another interesting element discovered inside the notebook is the space reserved for numbering the album. In its own way, it confirms the fact that, like Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Tintin in the Congo benefited from a numbered and signed first edition. Rare albums... but what about this object?