This is how I discovered the work of Francois Place...
One day about three years ago I was trying to find a place I'd never been before in one of the most infuriating quartiers of Paris - Montmartre. After having gone up and down a few of the steep staircases Montmartre is famous for, I decided to have a cigarette break to calm my nerves and there on the windowsill of where I stopped to fish out my smokes was a book called "Du pays de Jade à l'Île Quinookta". Since it was early morning and the garbage bins (called bacs) had not been taken, I thought someone had bothered to fish this book out of the bins, but had left it there. Maybe I was wrong and I actually stole someone's book, in which case I'm very sorry, but actually not really because this trash was a treasure.
If one visits the bookshops and comic book shops of Paris, you will see a lot of illustration similar to Place's style and I am not well-versed enough to say that Place came first or second or third, or whatever the particular details might be. His Wikipedia page (in French) is rather sparse, and his Amazon page simply lists the books he's worked on, but if ever one day I should be lucky enough to be able to have my own works illustrated, I would definitely put him on top of a very short list.
They say pictures are worth a thousand words, so I'll cut this post short, and maybe you'll see why I fell so in love with a book that was saved from a rubbish bin and then saved from a window sill to be part of my library and a source of inspiration.
One day about three years ago I was trying to find a place I'd never been before in one of the most infuriating quartiers of Paris - Montmartre. After having gone up and down a few of the steep staircases Montmartre is famous for, I decided to have a cigarette break to calm my nerves and there on the windowsill of where I stopped to fish out my smokes was a book called "Du pays de Jade à l'Île Quinookta". Since it was early morning and the garbage bins (called bacs) had not been taken, I thought someone had bothered to fish this book out of the bins, but had left it there. Maybe I was wrong and I actually stole someone's book, in which case I'm very sorry, but actually not really because this trash was a treasure.
If one visits the bookshops and comic book shops of Paris, you will see a lot of illustration similar to Place's style and I am not well-versed enough to say that Place came first or second or third, or whatever the particular details might be. His Wikipedia page (in French) is rather sparse, and his Amazon page simply lists the books he's worked on, but if ever one day I should be lucky enough to be able to have my own works illustrated, I would definitely put him on top of a very short list.
They say pictures are worth a thousand words, so I'll cut this post short, and maybe you'll see why I fell so in love with a book that was saved from a rubbish bin and then saved from a window sill to be part of my library and a source of inspiration.
