![cover image](https://wikiwandv2-19431.kxcdn.com/_next/image?url=https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/87/Frans_Masereel_%25281919%2529_Passionate_Journey%25E2%2580%2594arriving_on_the_train.jpg/640px-Frans_Masereel_%25281919%2529_Passionate_Journey%25E2%2580%2594arriving_on_the_train.jpg&w=640&q=50)
Passionate Journey
1919 novel by Frans Masereel / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Passionate Journey, or My Book of Hours (French: Mon livre d'heures), is a wordless novel of 1919 by Flemish artist Frans Masereel. The story is told in 167 captionless prints, and is the longest and best-selling of the wordless novels Masereel made. It tells of the experiences of an early 20th-century everyman in a modern city.
![A black-and-white drawing of a man leaning out of an arriving train.](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/87/Frans_Masereel_%281919%29_Passionate_Journey%E2%80%94arriving_on_the_train.jpg/320px-Frans_Masereel_%281919%29_Passionate_Journey%E2%80%94arriving_on_the_train.jpg)
Masereel's medium is the woodcut, and the images are in an emotional, allegorical style inspired by Expressionism. The book followed Masereel's first wordless novel, 25 Images of a Man's Passion (1918); both were published in Switzerland, where Masereel spent much of World War I. German publisher Kurt Wolff released an inexpensive "people's edition" of the book in Germany with an introduction by German novelist Thomas Mann, and the book went on to sell over 100,000 copies in Europe. Its success encouraged other publishers to print wordless novels, and the genre flourished in the interwar years.
Masereel followed the book with dozens of others, beginning with The Sun later in 1919. Masereel's work was lauded in the art world in the earlier half of the 20th century, but has since been neglected outside of Western comics circles, where Masereel's wordless novels are seen as anticipating the development of the graphic novel.