Hergé : Tintin, white cover of the album "Tintin in the Congo" in its original "Petit Vingtième" edition of 1931, with graphite illustrations. The certificate of authenticity from the Hergé committee is included. Size : 48 x 31 cm. A prestigious piece beyond the albums At first glance, and unless you are particularly well-informed about publishing, this object might appear to be what is known as a "blotter", a banal desk accessory on which to place the page you are writing or the drawing you are working on. Some writers' or artists' desk blotters are, by their very nature, works of art and can therefore be considered museum pieces... This object does not aspire to such a status, but it does have some special features that should attract the attention of 'specialised' collectors of Tintin albums. It is in fact what bibliophiles call a "blanco" element, a simulation of the result.//R// //R//A blanco cover When a publishing project takes shape, the publisher can obtain from its printer either a "blanco cover" or a "blanco volume", produced on the paper and in the format chosen and comprising the same number of pages as the planned work. It is not known whether the first Tintin albums benefited from a "volume blanco", which would have been made available to Abbé Wallez, the publisher. What we do know is that Hergé received at least one "blanco cover", and the one shown here is not just any cover. The green cloth linking the two covers reveals to Tintinophiles that it was the cover for Tintin in the Congo in its original 1931 edition. A desk blotter located and identified Last but not least, the object was later used for a long time as Hergé's desk blotter. Precisely at the time when he was creating The Black Island, in 1937-1938, as evidenced by these elements drawn in pencil, almost erased but always identifiable: the plane of the counterfeiters sketched twice, an image of Tintin walking and, above all, the many representations of horse-guard grenadiers in furry caps or British police Bobbies that surround him. In the midst of this tangle, you will be surprised to see the name (elegantly handwritten in capitals) of Spirou (the rival weekly to Le Petit Vingtième, launched on 21 April 1938) and the name of a famous Brussels decorating company (Vanderborght) that Georges Remi probably commissioned. A temporary collection of ideas Lastly, the underlined word "idées" (ideas) affixed by the artist to the middle of one of the two plates seems to indicate that, after having served as a desk pad for the creator of Tintin, the object may have served as a collection of notes or ideas before he decided to record them in a smaller notebook bearing the explicit title: Tintin - Idées. A piece of evidence Another interesting element discovered inside the notebook is the space reserved for numbering the album. In its own way, it confirms the fact that, like Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Tintin in the Congo will have benefited from a numbered and signed first edition. Rare albums... but what can we say about this object?