Alsace, Storks, Paper Museums, Verlaine and Gargoyles.

My wife and her parents had driven from Le Mans, France over to Eguisheim, a little town just SW of Colmar, in Alsace. I was to meet them there (last summer). Not exactly book country, but there were lots of storks

clacking around, doing

what

storks do best.

There was also plenty of Gewürztraminer, so I was more than happy to head over. After I arrived we took off almost immediately for Basel where I visited The Swiss Museum for Paper, Writing and Printing while Caroline, JJ and MJ settled in at a riverside restaurant to admire some of Basel’s beautiful, bright yellow municipal construction machinery

and Big Pharma getting bigger on the facing shore, due of course to the fact that the entire human population is now on medication. No cures. Just treatments.

At the museum I started off in the basement where they make paper. I was accompanied by Brigitte Corda who is in charge of marketing and communications. Brigitte was keen to stress that few other paper museums in the world cover the full gamut as well as hers does - papermaking on the first level, up through the history of writing and type on the second plus a foundry in actual production,

then on to where they print the books, and finally skyward again to a bindery where the bookmaking process comes to a conclusion. It all recalls life in the building at the end of the 18th century when printer/publisher Johann Rufolf Im Hof and his wife Anna Blum had a print shop and used to make books. Then as now printing and papermaking took place under the same roof.

Today visitors get to witness print and paper produced on a variety of old original machines, and to give it a try themselves if they wish. They can even experiment with marbled paper in a workshop up top, it’s all very hands-on.

End products are on-sale in the museum store, which helps to offset costs.

It’s a private operation stocked with an impressive amount of machinery and significant collections of paper, moulds, leather working tools, and more. There’s also some archival material on the Helvetica typeface, created by the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) which used to be located in nearby Münchenstein.

I had hoped to grab a slice of cake/icing from the Museum’s restaurant

but the family arrived just as I was about to sit down, so it was back off to Alsace, and Eguisheim, where we spent the early evening at a wine-tasting event trying to coax the bartender into pouring more than just a taste into our glasses. Eventually, parched, I was forced to head round the corner to buy a box of bottles from one of the local caves.

Next morning we drove into Colmar, home of ‘Hansi’ (Jean-Jacques Waltz, 1873 -1951), a staunch pro-French activist famous for his charming drawings, many of which contained harsh critiques of the Germans, especially burly German tourists. Born in Colmar following annexation of Alsace by the German Empire in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, Waltz worked as an artist in the textile business and illustrated postcards and programs for local festivals and events. He started publishing satirical works in 1908 under his pseudonym and became famous after his polemic Professor Knatschke (1912) hit the bookstores. It was a best-seller, but not in Germany. In fact in 1914 the German authorities threw him in jail because of it. His one-year sentence caused a national outcry in France. He soon escaped though, joining the French military as a translator-officer. The Nazis were still after him during the second world war. He’s considered a national hero in France, and of course, his books are very collectible.

In addition to Hansi’s ducks we also saw these chickens in a store window

and

gargoyles.

(I happen to love gargoyles).

After a stop for refreshments, I headed for the bookstores. Not being super-conversant with the French antiquarian book market (which is why I subsequently interviewed renowned bookseller Benoit Forgeot about it when I visited Paris [stay tuned for the adventure], and Tiphaine Guillermou about French book design), I decided to keep things simple: I’d look for books about Canada. Surely no-one would be interested in them, and they’d be priced accordingly.

While I didn’t find anything ‘Canadian’ in this shop

these volumes did catch my eye

Whenever I see Hugo’s name I’m reminded of a visit Caroline and I took to his apartment in Paris a couple of years ago where I learned that during his lifetime he’d slept with more than a thousand women (or was it two?). Yes. A life of writing and sex. And eating, I guess. Oh and sketching too.

I had more success at the next shop

where I found this

for only 15 Euros. On one of the free-end papers at the rear of the book I came across this delightful little portrait which I assume was executed at around the time of publication in the mid-1800s judging by the doo. Would this add or subtract to the book’s value I wondered. I’d have to take it in to a knowledgeable bookseller.

Turns out that bookseller was Guy de Grosbois in Montreal. Amazingly Guy recognized a previous owner’s signature which appears at the front of the book. We agreed to trade items. I got this lovely piece of circa-1967 ephemera from Inco, plus several other choice pieces for my American-companies-pretending-to-be-Canadian-by-being-good-patriotic-corporate-citizens-while-sucking-huge-profits-out-of-the-country-notably-during-the-50s-and-60s Collection.

Sculpture: ‘Man’ by Alexander Calder

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking (aside from the fact that I got ripped off): Inco is a Canadian company. Well, not necessarily. It’s complicated. In fact, Inco poses the same problem that many other companies do when they come up for scrutiny during my ephemera hunting expeditions. The same one that A.E. Safarian cites in his book Foreign Ownership of Canadian Industry: A lack of frickin’ information). Who really owns/controls the firm and where do its profits go? This can be a pretty vexing question. It’s often very difficult to determine ownership of these monster companies, and virtually impossible to tell how much cash is leaving the country. There used to be a government regulation that forced American subsidiaries to publicly disclose their earnings. If I’m not mistaken John Manley, Liberal finance minister at the time, did away with it in the late 1990s. Yes. That would be the same John Manley who took over from Thomas d'Aquino as head of the Business Council on National Issues ten years later. The BCNI, as Mel Hurtig and I understand it, is basically a house organ for American big business in Canada.

But enough about Canada. Back to France. After a rather morose conversation with the young woman who owned the bookshop (she spoke about not being able to survive the summer - although happily, it appears as if she did), we all returned back to home-base in Eguisheim. Caroline had done an excellent job selecting our Airbnb. Spacious. Clean. Good air conditioning. Great view of the storks, up near nest level. Its only drawback: the fucking stairs. Narrow and numerous, I had to lug everyone’s baggage down them to the car. Then it was off to Metz to visit some long-time (70 years!) friends of my mother-in-law’s. It was heart-warming to witness the affection exchanged between these two.

While we were in town I snuck away to visit Paul Verlaine's Childhood Home. He lived a fairly staid life: abandoned his wife and child early on. Engaged in a torrid affair with Arthur Rimbaud (not a whisper about 'France's Oscar Wildes' however at the museum). Shot him. Was imprisoned. Took up Catholicism (okay that’s staid). Left for England to teach. Had another intense relationship back in France with a young male pupil who died prematurely of typhus. Descended into drug addiction, alcoholism, and poverty…and died at 51.

Quite the ‘maudit’ existence. But hey. It kindled some decent poetry. And…immortality.

Labelled as a symbolist, Verlaine’s work is subtle, allusive, decadent, urban. It influenced a lot of musicians, including Claude DeBussy:

The poem I most associate with Verlaine isn’t by him. It’s Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat.

Verlaine’s House in Metz has been in operation now for more than 100 years. I’m glad I visited, although the thing I remember most clearly about it is the period newspaper cartoons on the walls. They address mostly censorship, which is pretty ironic.

The landscape from Metz to Le Mans reminded me a bit of Saskatchewan’s.

Along the way we stopped at a ‘routier’. A roadside restaurant in a town that had a gigantic church decorated with some of the best gargoyles I’ve ever seen.

A crocodile for crying out loud. And a pig. Who ever heard of a pig gargoyle?

I was truly blessed to have seen this. To celebrate I had a Monaco

We saved dessert for when we got back to Le Mans, where I started busying myself with plans for Paris - catching up with Alice Notley, and interviewing Maylis Besserie for The Biblio File podcast, about her first novel. Her first Goncourt Prize-winning novel, Le Tiers Temps, features an aging Samuel Beckett. And then interviewing Pierre Assouline, and visiting Gallimard, and…stay tuned.