Félix Buhot (1847–1898).

Regarding a brochure currently in preparation, *Voyage au pays des vieux papiers*. The illustration at the top of the letter depicts a long, old trunk with metal fittings, a lantern placed on top, a few old books, and a mouse and a cat on the floor. Buhot is keen to retain the title Voyage au pays des vieux papiers; it is a project dating back to 1885, initially agreed with Dalligny, editor of the Journal des Arts, to reprint articles that had already appeared, a project that was subsequently abandoned. It was whilst sorting through his own papers in Saint-Malo, where he had taken ‘a box containing the collection of my articles pasted onto sheets, all the fragments and notes to be filed, and the documents he had amassed’, and by grouping the notes and fragments under a section entitled ‘Les Marges des manuscrits’ that he realised the importance of the papers ‘considered above all from the point of view of printing’. It was impossible to ignore the old papers, the antiquities, and the study of watermarks. Here comes the episode of “the trunk of old papers, found in Valognes in 1884, still half-full in the attic”, a trunk he sketches and which makes him recall all the places where he has seen papers, blank or printed: at paper wholesalers, print dealers, rag-and-bone men or scrap metal dealers ‘where one finds treasures […] in dusty provincial museums, in libraries where spiders spin their webs: a true journey that could only be called the Journey to the Land of Old Papers […] for the theme contained in the four words of this title can give rise to infinite variations for anyone who would or could strike all its chords…’