Title Page, *Histoire de la Sainte Russie*

The title sheet gathers three registers at once. Up top, heavy display capitals announce a "Holy Russia," undercut by a stack of mock-scholarly epigraphs that pile Horace on Rabelais on a scrawl of pseudo-Confucius. In the middle sits the joke that made the book famous, a wholly black square standing in for prehistory. At the bottom, a finely cut wood engraving shows polar bears padding across pack ice, the earliest "event" Doré deigns to illustrate. Issued in 1854 as France and Russia moved toward the Crimean War, the album is political satire dressed as a children's picture-book. The layout already thinks like a comic: heading, caption, framed image, each panel carried by a running deadpan voice that pulls you from page to page.