Braque

BRAQUE

I found this one through the same xe ôm network, a few months after the first collection. District 4 in those years was still a working docklands neighbourhood: river trade, warehouses, narrow lanes running down to the water, not the kind of place you’d expect a European art book to have survived at all. It had belonged to a family who’d worked for a French shipping concern before 1975, and it had spent the decades since wrapped in oilcloth at the back of a storage loft above a boat-repair yard, kept dry more by luck than design. The dust, when I unwrapped it, smelled like the river.