Roger Duvoisin illustrated his first Limited Editions Club book in 1944 it was a book by Robert Louis Stevenson, and it was called, and will be called until the end of time, A Child’s Garden of Verses. You may have read some of them or given them to someone who did: The Four Corners of the World, Petunia, Petunia and the Song, A for the Ark, Petunia’s Christmas, Petunia Takes a Trip (just like RLS). When he came to America in 1927, he first applied his talents to this same field, but by 1932 he was drawing illustrations for books and for magazines and writing children’s books (with illustrations by Roger Duvoisin, of course).

He initiated his artistic career by designing pottery then he took up textiles, moving from Geneva to Lyons and Paris. He became an American citizen in 1938.) He was born in Geneva in 1904, and studied there at the Ecole Professionelle, Ecole des Arts et Metiers, and Ecole des Beaux Arts. Roger Duvoisin, who has illustrated this loveliest of all editions of Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes and thereby himself contributed greatly to its loveliness, is not a Cévénol but a Swiss. I’m looking forward to taking this with me the next time I take a few days off and escape from the hustle and bustle of downtown.Īs always, the Limited Editions Club commissioned their own artwork for their edition, and the Monthly Letter provides many interesting anecdotes. It’s considered a pioneering classic of outdoor literature and Stevenson’s ‘sleeping sack’ influenced modern-day sleeping bags. The route that he took has since become very popular, and there’s actually a little tourist industry in the Cévennes that caters to hikers who want to retrace Stevenson’s route on the trail, now known as GR70. It chronicles a twelve-day, one hundred and twenty mile hike he took through the south of France with his donkey Modestine. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes is one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s earliest works, written while he was still in his twenties and published in 1879.

Rl stevenson travels with a donkey