Review of the repertoire of the publishing house of I.S. Lapin in Paris on the basis of the French periodicals of the first third of the 20th century

The Russian-French publisher Ilya Solomonovich Lapin is well-known to Russian deltiologists by the results of his activities: in particular, the postcards of the publishing house of Lapin are popular among collectors. At the same time, the books published by him are known to a lesser extent, mainly because they were intended mainly for the French market. The Gallica database of the National Library of France, containing a digitised archive of French periodicals with the possibility of full-text search, makes it possible for the first time to compile a quite voluminous chronology of the book publishing activity of Lapin in Paris and to form an idea of how his books were perceived and assessed by contemporaries in the person of French journalists and critics. The first mention of the books of Lapin in the French periodicals refers to 1912. In this and several subsequent years, the publisher mainly produced art albums - for example, sets of images of paintings from the collections of the Louvre and the Luxembourg Museum - in connection with which he was made into the Knights of the Order of the Legion of Honour. During the First World War, Lapin printed posters of military-patriotic content according to the drawings of a number of famous artists of that time. By 1920, the publisher fulfilled a government order for replicating the official report on the admission of the US President Wilson in the Paris City Hall Hotel de Ville; in subsequent years La-pin completed several other similar orders from the French government. In 1922 the publisher printed a luxuriously designed program album for the secular event The Grand Prix Ball and published the novel by D. Diderot Jacques the Fatalist and his Master, with 120 original illustrations by J. Hemard, and the book Cabaret by A. Arnoux, with etchings by R. Renefer. In 1923 Lapin published a collection of works by the poet P. Nolhac Poems about France and Italy with colour engravings by P.-E. Colin. Shortly thereafter, the publisher acquired exclusive rights to print the works of the French brother writers Tharaud for a period of 10 years, and released the novels The Lady-Servant (1924) and The Arab Holiday (1925) in a luxurious design. In 1925 Lapin's edition of A. France's Island of Penguins with illustrations by L. Jou was noted in the report on the work of the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts and Modern Industry held in Paris. Over the next few years, the publisher conceived and performed three book series: Panathenees, Images of Time and a collection of publications by the French explorer M. Bouteron about H. de Balzac. The last book of Lapin was the novel of the Tharaud brothers The Shadow of the Cross with etchings by F. Brangwin. It was published almost simultaneously with the death of the publisher in October 1931.

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