Georges Lorin made this sketch of Allais sometime in the ’90s. Jean Veber added to his gallery of Allais caricatures, with a portrait of Allais in the costume he proposed for the members of the Académie Française. Jean Villemot drew this curious portrait for the cover of Le Sourire. An anonymous silhouette, from a country […]

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Today is April 1, a day sanctified by the extraordinary French humorist Alphonse Allais; and I am happy to announce that it brings the release of Captain Cap, Volume 2. Allais’s stories of his absurd anti-hero, first published in 1902, have been meticulously translated and illustrated by Doug Skinner, in the second volume of a […]

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Jean Veber drew several caricatures of Allais in Le Journal, January 6, 1896; here are two of them. Ernest La Jeunesse (who, parenthetically, had a long affair with Allais’s wife, and may have fathered her child) drew this sketch of the unhappy husband.   Pierre le Trividie drew this portrait of the young Allais in […]

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As I continue to translate and illustrate Alphonse Allais, I’ve been contemplating the many caricatures of him.  Having already offered portraits of his semi-fictional antihero, Captain Cap, I’ll now post some of the man himself.  Internet Allais buffs, you’re welcome. The first is by Cabriol, aka Georges Lorin, from the Hydropathe, January 28, 1880.  Allais’s […]

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When I suggested to Norman Conquest, the CEO of Black Scat Books, that I translate the Captain Cap stories of Alphonse Allais, he was all for it.  However, he also proposed that I draw the cover, which left me with a problem:  what did Captain Cap look like? The French pocket book that my friend […]

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Alphonse Allais was a peerless French humorist, celebrated posthumously by the Surrealists for his elegant style and disturbing imagination.  Among other things, he wrote a series of wonderful stories about his friend Albert Caperon.  In Allais’s hands, “Captain Cap” became an adventurer and inventor, with a disdain for bureaucracy and a heroic thirst for cocktails.  […]

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John G. Saxe takes his rightful place in the canon, in this 1874 edition of “Vignette Authors” from Selchow & Richter.  His colleagues are: Washington Irving, W. C. Bryant, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Bayard Taylor, W. M. Thackeray, J. F. Cooper, J. G. Whittier, Wilkie Collins, Revd. H. W. Beecher, J. Russell Lowell, J. G. […]

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Here, as a Christmas treat, is the story of “The Monkey and the Parrot,” written by Alphonse Allais in 1899, and translated by the undersigned this afternoon. THE MONKEY AND THE PARROT Speaking of parrots, do you know the Persian fable of “The Monkey and the Parrot,” a story both ingenious and rich in instruction […]

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Readers of Raymond Roussel’s penultimate work, Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique, are faced with a problem. The work is built on a system of nested parentheses, and they’re hard to negotiate. Some readers have built machines, or used card files; I found it easier to make a map, which I could then check to find my way […]

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We have here another early edition of “Authors”; I found it without a box, so can offer no information on date or publisher.  Dickens seems to be sporting unruly hair and beard in this portrait.  The other writers in the pantheon this time are: Longfellow, Irving, Cooper, Scott, Holmes, and Burns. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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