Découvertes Gallimard
Découvertes Gallimard is an editorial collection of illustrated monographic books published by the Éditions Gallimard in pocket format. The books are concise introductions to particular subjects, written by experts and intended for a general audience.
Created in the style of livre d'art, the collection is based on an abundant pictorial documentation and a way of bringing together visual documents and texts, enhanced by printing on coated paper, as commented in L'Express, "genuine monographs, published like art books". Its creator—Pierre Marchand the "iconophile", as remarked by the German graphic designer Raymond Stoffel—was instrumental in moulding the policy and ideals of the collection, which was an immediate success both in France and internationally.
The first title À la recherche de l'Égypte oubliée appeared on 21 November 1986, authored by the French Egyptologist Jean Vercoutter. These scholarly little books then released in successive volumes, without a systematic plan, each of which is structured like a separate book. 588 titles were published by November 2012, with more than 160 volumes of spin-offs and catalogues as of 2021.
Overview
The books are printed using A6 format, according to Encyclopædia Universalis, "with breathtaking iconography " reproduced on thick and glossy coated paper, from which leap two or three images per page. In this picture-dense format, the authors must squeeze their words in edgewise. Each book is composed of a monograph on a particular topic, the whole collection covers all areas of human knowledge and experience, such as archaeology, art, culture, civilisation, history, music, religion, science, et cetera, with 502 specialists' contributions. Chronological narrative is the principal structure for describing a subject, for example, the title Le ciel, ordre et désordre, which narrated in chronological order to present the varied subjects relating to the sky above and peoples' perception of it, through historical perspective of cultural, social and religious aspects.The captions for illustrations must be informative, they should not duplicate information in the body text, nor do they interrupt the narrative thread. Researchers and academics must adhere to the constraints of a mainstream collection. Apart from obvious analytical abilities, authors are expected to write quality text and a sensitivity to illustration. A "Découvertes" is not a book of authorship, the author is only one of the many speakers. Bruno Blasselle, director of the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, author of two volumes of Histoire du livre, and co-author of the title La Bibliothèque nationale de France : Mémoire de l'avenir, explained his experience of working for the collection: "For an author, to write a Découvertes title is to be trapped, to put oneself in a situation of being obliged to go beyond his/her own formulation."
The cover design is one of the specificities. The old covers are glossy with black background illustrated in colour, the newer covers are matt-laminated rather than glossy, but more colourful, with different colour codes according to the subject matter. It differs from other reference books by its visual: a full-size picture, with its framing and the power of figurative elements, also a picture well-matched to the inside page layout, with a tiny, relevant picture illustrating the spine. The visual identity is strong, one can even easily recognise the collection's international editions. However, there are some exceptions, for instance, the Barcelonese publisher Ediciones B adopted a completely different cover design for their collection Biblioteca de bolsillo CLAVES.
Each title contains 128–224 pages with approximately 120–220 illustrations printed in four, five, six, or seven colours, both matte and glitter, and sometimes even gold, as in the title Richard Wagner : L'opéra de la fin du monde, the metallic gold heightens Carl Otto Czeschka's illustrations from Nibelung. Each book begins with 8–10 full-page illustrations or photographs, prefaced by a pull-quote on the inside front cove, which Thames & Hudson director Jamie Camplin calls it a "cinema-influenced trailer". For the title Champollion : Un scribe pour l'Égypte, this book opens with a succession of reproductions of Champollion's manuscript Grammaire égyptienne; in L'Europe des Celtes, the reader is greeted by a series of bronze masks and hoary faces carved in stone; the "trailer" for La Saga de l'espace evokes the tragic launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986; while that of La Tour de Monsieur Eiffel presents the Eiffel Tower at every stage of its construction.
The novelty lies in the subtle orchestration of the text and the illustration, where successive sequences, inserts and foldouts overlapping in double pages. According to the subject, the body text is structured into three to eight chapters, consisting of 64 to 128 pages. Each chapter is built using journalistic methods, with a lead paragraph and intertitle. The corpus is punctuated by double-page spreads of images, known as inserts, sort of a halt for pictures. For the title La peur du loup, two double-page spreads of reproductions of Gustave Doré's engravings to illustrate Little Red Riding Hood. These books benefit a lot from journalistic and cinematographic techniques, some titles include panoramic foldouts, kind of projection on big screen. Two foldouts in the title Pompéi, la cité ensevelie, one showing Léon Jaussely's reconstruction of the forum of Pompeii, the other representing the actual condition of the theatre quarter in 1859 by using Paul-Émile Bonnet's drawings, both in a panoramic view. In the title Le papier : Une aventure au quotidien, through a partnership with paper companies, there are even three luxurious foldouts that all made on different papers from Arjo Wiggins, presenting one of the century watercolours on the traditional manufacture of Chinese paper; the other of the engravings and drawings by Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci; the third depicts today's paper production line with its different machines.
Unlike the corpus in colour, the second part—the "Documents" section —is always printed in black and white. It works as an anthology, providing more specialised texts from relevant authors, excerpts, historical records, among others. It contains files made jointly by the author or the publisher, with lead paragraph to link texts and short captions for each file. According to the subject, an annex concludes "Documents" section with a chronology, a filmography, a discography or a bibliography, with a "List of Illustrations" giving full details of the sources of illustrations, an alphabetical index, as well as photo credits, dedicated to those who want to go deeper into the subject.
The collection also stands out for its attention to detail. On the choice of typeface, for example, Trump Mediaeval for body text, ITC Franklin Gothic for titling, Zapf Dingbats for guillemets, italic for captions with an initial and the last line is underlined, et cetera. The French editions are printed by Kapp Lahure Jombart in Évreux, while the Italian printer Gianni Stavro, who has largely contributed to the elaboration of new techniques used in the collection, retains his position as collaborator for international reissues and coeditions. The bindings are solid, sewn and not glued. As Gallimard's promise to their readers, "the most beautiful pocket collection in the world".
The collection formerly consisted of eighteen series—Archéologie, Architecture, Art de vivre, Cinéma, Histoire, Histoires naturelles, Invention du monde, Littérature, Mémoire des lieux, Musique et danse, Peinture, Philosophie, Religions, Sciences, Sculpture, Sports et jeux, Techniques and Traditions—which have been abandoned, it is now reorganised around seven major subjects with colour codes: Arts, Archéologie, Histoire, Littératures, Religions, Culture et société and Sciences et techniques.
History
Découvertes Gallimard was born in Gallimard Jeunesse, based on an idea by Pierre Marchand after the publications of two pocket collections: Découvertes Cadet in 1983 and Découvertes Benjamin in 1984. These three Découvertes collections cater to three levels: grades 4 to 6, grades 7 to 9, and grades 10 and up. This pocket encyclopaedia initially named Les Chemins de la connaissance, Pierre Marchand already had the idea when he entered Gallimard in 1972, as he explained: "I have invested fourteen years of my professional life in this collection. Thanks to the success of 'choose your own adventure books' that we were able to embark on this adventure. For the first time, genuine encyclopaedias in pocket format. Our bet is that once you open the book, no matter what subject you read or which page you are on, you can no longer close it." Françoise Balibar, Jean-Pierre Maury, Jean-Pierre Verdet, Marc Meunier-Thouret and some others were the first to experience this pharaonic project that would await the arrival of Élisabeth de Farcy and Paule du Bouchet, in 1981, for truly to take shape. To producing genuine encyclopaedias in pocket format and fully illustrated in colour, in that time, many judged such an editorial project insane. In November 1986, however, the collection was released at Gallimard and directed by Élisabeth de Farcy. She chose authors and organised iconographic campaigns, several editors and iconographers were then gathered, copious "iconographies" were extracted from heritage resources. Élisabeth explained in an interview with La Croix : "The image should occupy a central place, as in a work of art." The authors were sceptical about this project at first, even contemptuous, but they have eventually been fascinated by the collection. Some have even authored several books, such as Françoise Cachin, curator of the Musée d'Orsay, author of three books – Gauguin : « Ce malgré moi de sauvage », Seurat : Le rêve de l'art-science, Manet : « J'ai fait ce que j'ai vu » ; the physicist Jean-Pierre Maury, who wrote four titles – Galilée, le messager des étoiles, Comment la terre devint ronde, Newton et la mécanique céleste and Le palais de la Découverte ; or the historian of religion, who published seven books in the collection.A preview edition, or "zero edition" was sent to 500 booksellers during the summer of 1986. The collection was officially released on 21 November of the same year. The first twelve titles, twenty-five thousand copies of each volume were printed. "We've never seen so many things between the first and last pages of a book" is the slogan proposed by Pascal Manry's advertising agency CLM BBDO for the launch of the collection. Without market research at the start, Pierre Marchand, a self-taught man, explained on the television programme ': "This project was as old as my thirst for knowledge. No doubt it is necessary to be precisely self-taught to sense the importance of an encyclopaedia. We must have been forced to build our own culture, to seek reliable references, to make clear statements. To conceive 'Découvertes', I didn't need market research, surveys or tests. Right from the start, I wanted to give the public the books I needed." Although "Découvertes" was reserved for youth at the beginning, it was eventually launched for the general adult public. The collection then had a rapid-growth, 105 titles appeared in five years. The first international collaboration was started with the Madrid-based Spanish publisher in 1989, and 19 countries would finally be associated with the project. In 1992, after 151 titles have been published, Gallimard showed interest in the work on mermaid and Siren by, a Belgian Dutch-language writer. Nevertheless, the Parisian publishing house hesitated, "interesting subject, but how can you illustrate that?" Then De Donder showed a list of about one thousand images that he gathered over years, Gallimard was convinced and made him the first non-French-language author published in the collection.
In the heyday of "Découvertes" at the turn of the 1990s, authors were mainly recruited from academics and curators. Numerous artist monographs were often published on the occasions of major exhibitions, with a predilection for painters and musicians. Such as the title Matisse : « Une splendeur inouïe » was released for the exhibition "Henri Matisse 1904–1917" at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1993; and Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac's Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was on sale at the exhibit of Vigée Le Brun's paintings in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Or reactivity in relation to current events, for instance, the title Sang pour sang, le réveil des vampires was published on 5 January 1993 for the release of Francis Coppola's Dracula in France; and La mine dévoreuse d'hommes for the release of the French film Germinal; Un Conservatoire pour les Arts et Métiers for the bicentennial of the CNAM; La Mode : Un demi-siècle conquérant was on sale on the occasion of "Yves Saint Laurent retrospective" at the Petit Palais in 2010. Some works were launched within an extremely limited time frame, such as Mémoires du Louvre, for the inauguration of the Louvre Pyramid in 1989; and Les Temples de l'opéra for the Opéra Bastille in 1990, both completed in six to eight weeks instead of the usual two or three months. Alongside many works dictated by current events, there are also a number of "strange curiosities", such as a book devoted to red hair, which is unusual in this type of collection. Some subjects can be more difficult to sell but considered necessary, such as the perspective, images of human body and mannerism. But in recent years, there were more monographs on memoirs of places and large institutions instead of artists, as well as various sociological and religious aspects, for instance, a book on the history of New York City by Jerome Charyn, which is translated and adapted from his English work Metropolis: New York as Myth, Marketplace, and Magical Land ; titles on agrifood, on homosexuality, or on drugs ; titles about Marian devotions and apparition, about Christian saints and Sufism. And also numerous volumes devoted to writers, for example, the title Proust : La cathédrale du temps.
Difficult subjects were frequently in demand, possibly because there was less competition. Thus a book on the Cistercian monks was one of the bestsellers in 1990. While the others like La fièvre de l'or or Sous le pavillon noir : Pirates et flibustiers are presumably subjects more common and popular, were relative failures. Generally, the most popular titles are those from Arts and Archéologie series, the title À la recherche de l'Égypte oubliée and the title L'écriture, mémoire des hommes—both in Archéologie series—remain two of the bestsellers. As of 2001, the former would have sold more than five hundred thousand copies worldwide. As for the Sports et jeux series, there are only four most favoured titles: La saga du Tour de France, La balle au pied : Histoire du football, Jeux Olympiques : La flamme de l'exploit and Voyous et gentlemen : Une histoire du rugby. Competition has emerged as early as in the middle of the 1990s, with a gradual decrease in circulation and novelties, but partially offset by the sub-collection entitled Découvertes Gallimard Hors série, which is one of the five spin-offs.
Today, about fifteen old titles are updated every year according to current cultural and scientific research. As general history plays a central role in "Découvertes Gallimard", completed by archaeology, art history and science, richly accompanied by unpublished illustrations, thus it forms a solid editorial base. On 25 March 1994, a celebration was held at the Musée national des Monuments Français, for the publication of the title Voyages en Utopie. The collection experienced two successive redesigns, one in September 1998 for exterior model, and the other in March 2000 for interior page layout. Those reeditions underwent a decrease in page length, due to the reformulation introduced in the "Documents" section. The collection, which was too soon associated with a zapping visual culture, reaffirmed its first purpose: the image does not take precedence over the text, but combined with text to animate and enrich the reading. These books benefit from the latest technologies, with their mockups are all made using desktop publishing now. Since the QuarkXPress software was only released in 1987, the first 30 titles were made in a traditional way, with phototypesetting. The current price of a "Découvertes" book is between 8.40 and 15.90 euros according to its category and number of pages, this is considered an extremely low price for a book of this quality.
File:Encyclopedie de D'Alembert et Diderot - Premiere Page - ENC 1-NA5.jpg|thumb|The Encyclopédie is the first French encyclopaedia, a work edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert and many other contributors. It was one of the first encyclopaedias to realise the form we would recognise today, also the first one to include contributions from many named contributors, and perhaps the most famous early encyclopaedia. The title Le Roman vrai de l'Encyclopédie is dedicated to this work.
The collection, totalling 588 volumes, is never entirely translated into another language, partial translations have been made available in 19 languages. "This inexpensive pocket encyclopaedia embodies its humanistic dream: to make the most advanced state of knowledge available to everyone. Diderot and D'Alembert would not have denied it...", commented by Hedwige Pasquet, current directress of Gallimard Jeunesse. According to ', these "French-style nonfictions" have sold over twenty million copies worldwide as of 1999, with recently emerging markets in Asia and Eastern Europe, especially in Russia, about 100 titles have been published within four years. In 2002, during a presentation of "Découvertes Gallimard" in Moscow, the French ambassador to Russia Claude Blanchemaison told a Kommersant correspondent that he just finished reading , one of the latest titles from the collection at the time, which he found particularly interesting.
In order to remedy the problems of international proprietaries and reproduction rights of works of art, co-publishers firstly define a number of titles, then they choose according to their own editorial line, and share the high cost of worldwide photographic rights. Therefore, Harry N. Abrams in the United States chose more titles on traditional cultural subjects, such as À la recherche de la Rome antique or La Naissance de la Grèce ; while in Japan, the publisher prefers original titles, such as the title Les sorcières, fiancées de Satan, and the title L'Heure du grand passage : Chronique de la mort. The Madrilenian publisher Aguilar was the first one among "Découvertes"' international co-publishers since 1989, the first 12 titles for the Spanish collection Aguilar Universal were released in the same year. In Italy, the publisher Electa/Gallimard produced 128 titles within seven years; in Japan, the title for their series has been published in early 2017. In addition, foreign editions are usually co-printed to amortise fees and support countries with small circulation.
In addition to foreign publishers, Découvertes Gallimard has also been involved in national institutional partnerships for several years, notably the one held since 1989 with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux : thirty-two titles have been released, plus a title in English dedicated to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, the boxed set Impressionnismes and four books in the "Hors série". The principle of these co-editions is based on a sharing of costs and revenues, the RMN brings its knowledge of museums and distribution network, while the publisher brings its editorial competence. When a title is linked to an exhibition, it generates a lot of additional sales through the RMN. Other partnerships with public or private companies, such as the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, Crédit Mutuel, L'Oréal, paper industries, et cetera. The partner is sometimes explicitly indicated in the "acknowledgments", but it is most often mentioned equivocally, even modestly kept in silence.
Nonfiction book publishing has been in decline in France for several years, market saturation is one of the causes, competition from other medias is another, especially from the internet. Despite its excellent image to the public, Découvertes Gallimard is also concerned by this disaffection. It remains an indisputable success internationally, but in France, the sales are eroding. The number of new productions decreases and also the prints. On 1 March 1999, the creator of Découvertes, Pierre Marchand, after working for 27 years at Gallimard, left to become a creative director at Hachette. This was no doubt a big loss to the collection, but with more than 10 years of experience and a rich fund created over years, Découvertes finally surpassed the difficulties. The end of 2006 is marked by the celebration of the collection's anniversary and the publication of its title Art brut : L'instinct créateur. A website was specially created on this occasion, which is the current official website