La Fin Des Livres
by Albert Robida and Octave Uzanne
The End Of Books
A prognostication from the past
Introduction
In 1895 Octave Uzanne and Albert Robida published, in France, Contes pourles Bibliophiles ("Stories for Bibliophiles"). The eleven stories inContes, all revolving around books (or at least printing) areinteresting, bizarre, weird... one could go on in true Fanthorpian fashion. Buteven better than the stories are the illustrations by Albert Robida.
Robida was born in 1848 and died in 1926. During his lifetime he reportedlydrew 60,000 pictures and wrote and/or illustrated over 200 books. His firstpublished work came out in 1866, and he appeared in "La Vie Parisienne," aswell as journals less well-known to the world outside France. One of his works,La Guerre au XXe Siècle (1887) is of some interest in the field ofscience-fictional treatments of future wars, and is the subject of currentpapers and a critical edition by I. F. Clarke in Britain.
Robida is forgotten (or was never known) in America, but in France he isremembered. His sketches and caricatures, particularly of humorous andsatirical visions of what lay in the future, were decades ahead of their time.Disney adopted some of his drawings as backgrounds for their views of thefuture at a pavilion at Epcot, and web sites attempt today to bring some of hisbest work back into circulation.
If Robida is mostly forgotten, Uzanne can be truly said to have vanished fromthe cultural consciousness of the world. Yet he was well known as a writer andcritic of his day, and some of his works command high prices from rare-bookdealers. One presumes that much of his work was more bound to the circumstancesof the current day than were the drawings of Robida, whose art has a certaintimelessness to it (even where it graphically predicts a future thatdemonstrably did not happen).
What follows is one of the pieces from Contes. Writing and drawing in1894, Uzanne and Robida give us predictions of a post-literate society. Musicand speech are everywhere! Newspapers are forgotten, and news presenters arevalued for their emotional tone instead of the accuracy of their reporting.Recordings combined with cinema present costumed drama and humor in the home.(This is 1894, remember; Edison had truly just begun to produce his films.)
Printed books are over and done with! They are no longer needed. As somecompanies Hidden Knowledge, for example) begin to create electronicbooks that will never be published in printed form, we need to remember... itwas all predicted more than a hundred years ago.
Notes on the re-creation of "The End of Books"
The original drawings in the collection Contes pour les Bibliophileswere scanned as black-and-white drawings at 600 dpi, and cleaned up inPhotoshop. The drawings were extracted and processed individually to reducetheir file size and improve their visual presentation on computer screens. Thetext was run through Textbridge 9, which did a surprisingly good job at OCR.
The HTML layout merges the recovered text and the processed images backtogether again, and is designed to approximate that of the original. It isimpossible to imitate it exactly, for all browser configurations, in HTML. Youcan do it in PDF; we looked at conversion to PDF but