Sunday 21 March 2010

French Canadian Paperbacks - Part II Arsene Lupin

An earlier post described the Le Point d'Interrogation series from the Montreal publisher Les Editions Varietes. Twenty-three of the 28 books in the series were by Maurice Leblanc, creator of Arsene Lupin, the Gentleman-Burglar (title of the first collection of stories).

Here is one of his non-Lupin novels - Les Trois Yeux (The Three Eyes), published in October 1944. The book is digest sized, 192 pages and printed on high acid paper. Originally published in 1919 the story involves contact with three-eyed Venusians.

This edition is an exact reprint of a French digest published by Editions Pierre Lafitte in 1935, number 40 in a similarly named series. The cover is slightly modified with the price removed. There is no artist named on the Montreal edition. It looks like the same art but looking closely it appears to be a redrawn version of the French edition - artist Reschovsky (?).

Les Editions Varietes

Editions Pierre Lafitte

2 comments:

  1. How odd that the comet, nebula and stars have all shifted positions, yet are all still there.

    I like both. Certainly easier on the eyes than Leblanc's L'Eclat d'obus.

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  2. Right - that's what caught my eye and started me looking more closely. This is the only title that I have both editions so don't know if this was common to all the Montreal editions.

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