22 - Blaise CENDRARS. *The End of the World Filmed by the Angel N.-D.* Novel. Color illustrations by Fernand Léger. Paris: Éditions de La Sirène, 1919. Large quarto, tab-bound, black morocco leather, plain, unmarked spine, title in paper letters of various colors on the covers, illustrated covers and spine preserved, black cloth slipcase (Devauchelle).

Blaise CENDRARS. *The End of the World Filmed by the Angel N.-D.* Novel. Color illustrations by Fernand Léger. Paris: Éditions de La Sirène, 1919. Large quarto, tab-bound, black morocco leather, plain, unmarked spine, title in paper letters of various colors on the covers, illustrated covers and spine preserved, black cloth slipcase (Devauchelle). First edition. Limited edition of 1,225 copies (no. 53). 22 large compositions by Fernand Léger, 20 of which were stencil-colored in Richard’s studios. One of the finest artist’s books of the 20th century: Fernand Léger’s illustrations, straddling the line between figuration, abstraction, and typographic ornamentation, are a veritable fireworks display. This is the second book illustrated by Léger; his work in printmaking would not begin until the following year. “The strong primary colors used by Léger were achieved by directly applying watercolor through the stencil method. A message of modernity is evident on every page of this bibliophilic masterpiece” (Robert Flynn Johnson). A fine copy in black morocco leather decorated by Devauchelle, bound with tabs. (Johnson, *Artists’ Books in the Modern Era, 1870–2000*, no. 26; Peyré, *Peinture et Poésie*, no. 18; Castleman, *A Century of Artists’ Books*, 1994, pp. 170–171: “Cendrars’s twentieth-century satire *La Fin du Monde* is organized like a movie script and given a dizzying pictorial environment by Léger. By compressing space in the Cubist manner, Léger evokes a sense of simultaneity through overlapping and repetitive geometric and alphabetic forms.”)