In 1895 Octave Uzanne and Albert Robida published, in France, Contes pour les Bibliophiles (Stories for Bibliophiles). We're going to re-publish this as an e-book, taking advantage of the ability of modern technology to reproduce the color and monochrome images in ways that would be prohibitively expensive to duplicate on paper. Here's a sample to get your interest piqued.
The eleven stories in Contes, all revolving around books (or at least printing) are interesting, bizarre, weird... one could go on in true Fanthorpian fashion. But even better than the stories are the illustrations by Albert Robida.
Robida was born in 1848 and died in 1926. During his lifetime he reportedly drew 60,000 pictures and wrote and/or illustrated over 200 books. His first published work came out in 1866, and he appeared in "La Vie Parisienne," as well as journals less well-known to the world outside France. One of his works, La Guerre au XXe Siècle (1887) is of some interest in the field of science-fictional treatments of future wars, and is the subject of current papers and a critical edition by I. F. Clarke in Britain.
Robida is forgotten (or was never known) in America, but in France he is remembered. His sketches and caricatures, particularly of humorous and satirical visions of what lay in the future, were decades ahead of their time. Disney adopted some of his drawings as backgrounds for their views of the future at a pavilion at Epcot, and web sites attempt today to bring some of his best work back into circulation.