On books: September/October 2022
A Few Collectors by Pierre Le-Tan, translated from the French by Michael Z. Wise (New Vessel Press, 2022). 128 pp., color and b/w illus. The late French illustrator Pierre Le-Tan will be familiar to a good number of you from the many covers he drew for the New Yorker and other magazines—quietly elegant works, marked by the distinctive, painstaking freehand crosshatching Le-Tan used to give his compositions depth and contours. Beyond his graphic skills, in his native Paris, Le-Tan—his father was a Vietnamese artist, his mother a French journalist—was known for his belles lettres and as a collector and man-about-town of impeccable taste, usually to be found in a museum, art and antiques galleries, or an auction salesroom. It was in such places that Le-Tan met many of the characters he introduces us to in A Few Collectors, a slender memoir that first appeared in France six years before Le-Tan’s death in 2019 and has become available in an English translation only this year. The book consists of short, impressionistic chapters about fellow collectors Le-Tan encountered among the cultured in such locations as Paris, Rome, and Tangiers. Illustrations by Pierre Le-Tan (1950–2019), from his book A Few Collectors (2022). All photographs courtesy of New Vessel Press, New York. What they collect is secondary. Le-Tan makes it clear from the outset that he won’t be writing about “great collections that are of almost no interest to me, such as that of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé.” The collections he does describe might be composed of the exquisite: Islamic tiles, Chinese porcelain, Murano glass figurines, Old Master drawings, portraits by Christian Bérard. Or of the strange and eccentric: a collection of nineteenth-century wax heads, modeled on those of Italian criminals; a collection of found, crumpled pieces of paper—restaurant