La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France

Considered one of the milestones of early modernism, this collaborative artist’s book features a prose-poem by Swiss-born Blaise Cendrars recalling a journey he made as a boy on the Trans-Siberian Express, which ran from St. Petersburg, Russia, to the Sea of Japan. His companion on the trip is Jehanne, a young French prostitute named after Joan of Arc, and as the barren landscape rushes by him on the train, he recounts his childhood in Paris and imagines traveling to tropical paradises. Abstract designs by Sonia Delaunay, reproduced in pochoir (stenciling), guide the reader though the stream-of-consciousness narrative, the colors reflecting the mood and content of the poem. Together, the images and text achieve simultaneism, or a “simultaneous book” that stresses the equivalence between Delaunay's colorful abstractions and Cendrars' unconventional prose. Intended as an edition of 150, about 110 copies are known to have survived. Made from four sheets of folded simili Japon paper and bound accordion-style, the book measures 6 feet, 6-1/2 inches when extended. Placed end to end, the collective height of the sheets in the edition was calculated to equal the height of the Eiffel Tower, Paris’s commanding symbol of modernity.