Grosses bêtes & petites bêtes
Subtitle: [l'arche de Noé]
By: images et texte par André-Hellé.
Contributors: Tolmer (Firm); Oliver Wendell Holmes Collection (Library of Congress)
Publisher: Tolmer & Cie, 13 quai d'Anjou
Published: 1912
Place of publication: Paris
Language: fre
Number of pages: 48
Subjects: Animals -- Juvenile literature; Noah's ark -- Juvenile literature; Noah's ark in art; Lithographed books -- France -- Paris
Genres: Juvenile literature.
Other titles: Grosses bêtes et petites bêtes; Arche de Noé
Notes: Cover title.

Date of publication from an article by Esther Averill: André Hellé. Cf. The horn book, vol. 7, no. 3 (Aug. 1931), p. 179.

Hand lettered (lithographed) text and drawings with twenty mounted hand-colored (pochoir) illustrations.

Pochoir plates are signed with the author/artist's monogram: lower case initials ah inside a circle; dots for eyes and an underderlined mouth create a face.

In corrugated boards. Cover art is a mounted chromolithograph 39 cm. Printed endpapers have a Noah's Ark motif.

"André Hellé ... has worked not so much in terms of simplified lines ... as in plain masses represented by blotches of bright colour. ... [In] his "Arche de Noé," ... Tolmer ... stencilled the illustrations ... in large format. None of Hellé's colour effects were lost, and the animals stand boldly silhouetted like toys." Cf. Esther Averill, André Hellé, op. cit.

Tolmer, 60 ans de création graphique dans l'Ile St. Louis, p. 75

LC copy from the library of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.