Special Collections News

La Porte des Rêves: Art Nouveau Splendor

The McCormick Library of Special Collections is pleased to announce the acquisition of an iconic illustrated Art Nouveau book, the Symbolist writer Marcel Schwob's La Porte des Rêves. Published in Paris in 1899, this book of macabre tales was illustrated by Georges de Feure, a protégé of Siegfried Bing, the great entrepreneur of Art Nouveau and Japanese art in late 19th and early 20th century France. De Feure was responsible for the decoration of one of the rooms in Bing's pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition, and also achieved success as a furniture designer. One of 220 copies, the book is illustrated throughout and features a hand-colored triptych frontispiece, the "doors" of which open to reveal a marvelous hidden image.

This open window motif is echoed in our copy's splendid molded leather binding, the front panel of which shows a sleepwalker opening a pair of French windows, allowing entrance to a horde of grotesque imps and demons -- the "gate of dreams" of the book's title. The rear panel and spine are also decorated with mysterious spectral faces and the flowing sinuous lines so characteristic of Art Nouveau. The binding, believed to have been created by Louis Deze, is an astonishing tour de force: a haunting, alluring talisman, like a rubbed bronze tablet discovered under water in a dream.