Too Good To Cut

 Do you ever see something and just have to have it?  I know...too often.  Stay with me.  Recently a food blog I follow by David Lebovitz posted pics from an old French dictionary.  This was the page that started it all.  

 The colored "plates" blew me away and the hunt was on.  I found a good selection of individual pages, plus the more rare volume, on etsy.  I think the vintage French "Dictionary" is really what we in the U.S. call an encyclopedia because there are multiple volumes to a set.  And each volume was quite expensive. 

 Letting my fingers fly over Google, etsy and eBay, I narrowed down my search to "vintage LaRousse" and ultimately "Nouveau Universel".  There was one nice 2 volume set on etsy for $100.  Still, I Googled on. 

While there are many colored plates, mostly there are thousands of pages of definitions with illustrations on every page. 

Amazon.com had 2 sellers with copies of this edition from 1949.  For $25.  I chose the seller who was closest to me, expecting a slow arrival, and expecting the volumes to be in poor repair.  Because, after all, I planned to cut up the pages to use in my paper crafting.   

Well, ahem, the books arrived in a blink, and they are in excellent condition.  Too good to cut?!  Yes, I know I could scan the pages and make photocopies, but I much prefer to use original ephemera.  So, I, gulp, think I will cut, certainly the black/white pages.