By 1896, Jarry had been experimenting for two years with composite illustrations and with the integration of found imagery and original woodcuts. He had sometimes passed off his own primitive drawings and prints as woodcuts; he had recycled imagery in multiple publications and pursued his interest in early typography; and he had used the practice of assembling texts and images to create new conceptions of printed matter. These early investigations persisted in Perhinderion using almost no original content of his own. Jarry’s creative gestures registered indirectly, however. This spread appears to be a facsimile. It is actually a collage of multiple pages Jarry chose from a sixteenth-century book.
Composite page designs based on Sebastian Münster’s La cosmographie universelle (1552), in Perhinderion, no. 1 (March 1896). The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197086.