L'Automobile

Henri Farman's technical manual on automobile engineering, published in Paris by Schleicher Frères & Cie. The book combines 38 text figures with an innovative removable colored plate featuring layered cutaways and superimposed mechanical components—an early use of sequential visual instruction to explain how automobiles function. This pedagogical approach to breaking down complex machinery into comprehensible visual stages anticipated techniques later central to comic strip narrative: the panel system, graduated revelation of information, and the coordination of image and text to guide readers through process and causality.