Like many archetypes, the design of the celebrated collection Blanche/White published by the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) and Gallimard is the result of compound sensibilities—the taste and direction of the founders, which included André Gide and Jean Schlumberger—and the implementation by the printer Edouard Verbeke of the St. Catherine Press in Bruges.
There’s a collectively inherited idea of what constitutes a “Blanche”—an off-white cover stock which gives the collection its name, a paperback you can hold comfortably in your hand but perhaps not in your pocket, a single black ruled frame containing a double red frame, centered text alignment, a title colored red, the author’s name in black and the publisher’s italicised NRF device. The specific peculiarities are harder to define. Which white or cream exactly? Was it always this color or has time taken its toll? Text set in a high-contrast Didone or a Garalde? Titles set in all capitals or upper and lowercase, roman or italic? A warm typographic orange or a deep blood red?
Like the narrator of Aragon’s Blanche ou l’Oubli / Blanche or Forgetting who attempts to recall his love for Blanche, a woman he loved some forty years ago, we can forget what our love looks like, and over time her appearance changes. Here we attempt to capture an image of the Blanche collection. In this attempt to find the truth about the past, we are left in a state of uncertainty—though still in love with Blanche, we don’t quite know who she is.
Our selection classifies over 400 books into twenty-five thematic sections named after a book title within that theme. Within Pastiches et Mélanges we see the nuances and evolution in design of the same titles through time, in this case Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres / The Fruits of the Earth from 1937 to 1951, and Mallarmé’s Poésies from 1917 to 1941. Nouvelles du cœur / News from the Heart gives us Breton’s L’Amour fou / Mad Love, the obsessional kind of love that deranges the senses and two episodes of Le Crève-cœur / Heartbreak from Aragon. Un nom toujours nouveau / A Name Always New gathers Elsa, Barny, Nadja, Héloise, Tristan, Anny, Sylvia, Creezy and Isabelle amongst others. Those without a home, the orphans, or the difficult are housed in Fils de personne / Nobody’s son, here we place both L’Enfant de chœur / The Choirboy and Le Pire / The Worst.
[Text by John Morgan]
