Les Cinq Points

1912. XAUDARO, J. Les Cinq Points. Le dessin instructif et amusant pour les petits et les grands. 6 pp. With 7 sheets of printed tracing paper and 60 plates by Xaudaro. Oblong folio, 314 x 245 mm, bound in original publisher's illustrated boards, decorated endpapers. Paris: Ollendorff, 1912. First Edition, one of the very few surviving copies of this drawing book, which is at the same time a highly unusual illustrated book. The illustrations commence with "Five Points" (subsequently increasing to ten), in which the amateur artist is encouraged to create numerous sketches and figures of drawings utilizing one of the six specimens of tracing paper accompanying the volume: the "Points" are to be affixed to a blank piece of paper, and the student thereby creates his or her own composition surrounding the points. All six leaves of tracing paper are present in the above copy, as are all sixty of Xaudaro's highly curious plates of demonic figures and acrobats. Only one other copy is recorded in North American institutional collections (at Huntington, San Marino). Joaquin Xaudaro (1872-1933) was one of the founders of modern Cartoon and Comic illustration in Spain. The introduction to the present volume was by Achille Segard (1872-1936); Les Cinq Points is the only known work by Xaudaro on Drawing Technique and Line Art. On Xaudaro's importance as a comic illustrator, see Antonio Martín, Historia del Comic Español: 1875-1939 (Barcelona, 1978) chap. II ("Niveles de lenguaje del comic español, 1900/1917") the section on "Xaudaró, dibujante de comics" (pp. 33-37).