Idéale Catalog Cover — Type Record No. 57, Tron & Berthet

SELLES

[On the saddle badge:]
IDÉALE
57
MARQUE DÉPOSÉE
T … B

[On the oval stamped into the skirt:]
TYPE RECORD

TRON & BERTHET
PONT-ST-PIERRE
( EURE )

[A single printed plate, and the only piece of color artwork Tron & Berthet has left in this
archive. One saddle is laid across a plain black field, drawn rather than photographed and lit as
though it were jewelry: the leather rendered in warm honeyed gold, the frame, chariot and tension
bolt in cold blue-white chrome, no background, no rider, no machine, no price. The whole argument
of the sheet is that the object will carry itself.

The saddle is the No. 57. It is stamped TYPE RECORD in an oval on the skirt, and the skirt is
pierced with a graded line of holes running from small at the nose to large at the cantle, which is
the lightened racing pattern. The badge is the familiar lens shape with the letters at each end and
MARQUE DÉPOSÉE around the lower rim. The word SELLES is set at the top left in white and the maker’s
name and town at the lower right.

The dating is open and the record says so rather than settling it. The sheet prints no year. In the
Tron & Berthet catalog of about 1936 also held here, Type Record is the name of the No. 51 and the
No. 57 is the Critérium des Alpes, so the plate is naming the 57 by a designation that catalog gives
to another model. That is either a later re-use of the Record name or an earlier one, and there is
nothing on the sheet to say which. It is filed to the 1930s on the strength of the archive’s own
grouping with that catalog and the style of the artwork.

An open question worth recording: this may be the pictorial cover of the c.1936 catalog itself,
whose four earliest leaves begin at an inside title page rather than a cover. The proportions are
close to the two-color leaves of that book and the maker, town and marque all agree. Nothing on
either sheet proves it, so the plate is held as its own record until something does.]