Mon premier voyage: Tour du monde en 80 jours (My first voyage: Around the world in 80 days)

This book reprises the 1872 fiction novel Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. In his version, Jean Cocteau recounts a similar journey that he took with his lover Marcel Khill. Filled with detailed destination descriptions, Cocteau’s account reads more like a love letter to the world than an action-packed adventure log like Verne’s novel.
Mary Reynolds’s binding evokes both the practical and the beautiful elements of Cocteau’s voyage. When laid open, the endpapers show a full map of the globe, which readers can refer to as they follow Cocteau’s travels from one end of the world to the other. The front and back covers, however, feature a sideways map of the west coast of Scotland and an upside-down print of the southwest islands off of Turkey, capturing the disorientation that Cocteau may have felt as he navigated the world while battling opium addiction.
This binding is one of Reynolds’s more literal interpretations of a book’s content, while still engaging with the Surrealist techniques of juxtaposing text and image, and utilizing found material. Reynolds may have used maps taken directly from her and Duchamp’s studio walls to bind Cocteau’s novel, a decision similar to the broken teacup handle she stumbled upon and bound into the spine of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin.