BOCHOŘÁKOVÁ-DITTRICHOVÁ, Helena. Z mého dětství: dřevoryty [From My Childhood: Woodcuts].

By the First Female Graphic Novelist

BOCHOŘÁKOVÁ-DITTRICHOVÁ, Helena. Z mého dětství: dřevoryty [From My Childhood: Woodcuts]. Prague: Orbis . 1929.

Small 8vo. Publisher’s cream-colored boards, black vignette by the artist to front cover, in dust-jacket; pp. [2], [2 (woodcut title), 5–13, [1], [2 (blank)], [94 (full-page woodcut illustrations)], [2]; slight pushing to spine ends, corners a little bumped, very light foxing to extremities of boards and jacket, extremities of jacket very lightly worn, upper joint of jacket with short split (5 mm); internally near fine; author’s signature in pencil to title.

First trade edition, signed by the author to the title-page, of the first published work by Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichová (1894–1980), an autobiographical wordless novel recounting the artist’s childhood through woodcuts, this copy in remarkably good condition.

Widely recognised as the first woman to create graphic novels, Bochořáková-Dittrichová graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and, in 1923, received a government scholarship to study printmaking in Paris. There she likely encountered the popular wordless novels of Flemish artist Frans Masereel (1889–1972), whose pioneering 25 images de la passion d’un homme had appeared in 1918. Bochořáková began publishing woodcut narratives with Z mého dětství ( From My Childhood ) in 1929, and went on to produce fifteen graphic novels, the last published in 1969.

The work chronicles the everyday life of a middle-class girl in a provincial Moravian family, entirely through ninety-four woodcuts. Unlike the woodcut novels of Masereel and others, which focused on the portrayal of social injustice in squalid urban environments, From My Childhood takes a more personal approach. It is ‘a youthful work in the narrative sense, […] a novel of impressions’ (Beronä, p. 10). The English edition, accordingly, was subtitled ‘A Cycle of Woodcuts’, where ‘cycle indicates a series of impressions rather than a closely connected narrative’ (ibid.). The first Czech edition appeared in the same year as Lynd Ward’s (1905–1985) Gods’ Man , the first American wordless novel, and includes an introduction by the Czech literary critic and historian Arne Novák (1880–1939), who reflects on the impact of art without verbal interpretation. The novel appeared in German in 1930 as Kindheit and in French the same year as Enfance , followed by the first edition in English in 1931, published in a limited edition of 310 by Anton Zwemmer under the title Childhood .

Library Hub finds only a single copy in the UK, at the Bodleian.

See Beronä, ‘Artists Without Authors: The Wordless Novels of Helena Bochořáková, Babette Katz, Barbara Henry, and Jules Remedios Faye’, in The California Printmaker ( 2002 ), pp. 9–15 .

SKU: 2126412