The temptation of St. Frusquin

 

“Tout le saint-frusquin” is a French colloquialism translating roughly to “all one’s means and possessions”; in Hémard’s playful interpretation, Frusquin is an actual saint. The book is a series of drawings, generally hectic with activity and involving some combination of eroticism, violence, and grotesquerie.

Particularly inventive are the captions: no two share a textual style, and a rebus on one leaf might give way to staff notation, fictional advertisements, or Greek script on the next.

Le tentation de Saint Frusquin: PQ2615.E349 T46 1936; HOLLIS number 14248730

Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.