About
La Lettrine covers French literature between 1830 and 1970 — the works, the people who wrote them, and the houses that turned them into objects with a price and a cover.
The period is chosen rather than inherited. In 1830 a French novel was made by a printer with a shop: Stendhal, Hugo and Flaubert dealt with houses that set type, sold sheets and left the reader to cut the pages open. By 1970 a novel came out of an editorial committee, into a named series, under a livery a reader could recognise across a room, with a prize waiting for it in November. The six sections follow that change.
The sections
Novels
Writers
Houses
Fights
Rooms
Prizes
Novels takes the works themselves and what happened the morning after publication. Writers keeps to the working life and the public record. Houses is Gallimard, Grasset, Minuit, Le Seuil and the paperback that changed the price of reading. Fights covers the prosecutions, the manifestos and the arguments that turned into movements; Rooms the reading rooms, cafés, shops and archives where the work was done; Prizes the Goncourt, the Renaudot, the Femina and the Académie française.
Titles appear in French, italicised, with the English title alongside where one exists. Dates, print runs and prizes are attributed to the body that holds the record — the publisher, the academy, the library. Living writers appear only on their published work.
Every piece is a page about one named thing: a book with a date, a house with an address, a room a reader can still walk into. The archive lists all thirty.