Yvette Guilbert

by Gustave Geffroy, illustrated by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Translation by Barbara Sessions. Walker, $20.00. In its day, Geffroy’s remarks about Parisian cabaret shows, with Lautrec’s sketches of a famous cabaret artiste, were liberal as social comment and very avant-garde indeed as bookmaking. The facsimile edition, produced by the department of printing and graphic arts at Harvard, reveals that while Geffroy’s ideas have dimmed with time, the drawings are still wonderful, and the construction remains a black discredit to conventional methods of book design.