Pierre Marchand was born on 17 November 1939 in Bouin, a small port of the Marais breton in Vendée.

He left Fleurus in 1971 to create the monthly magazine Voiles et Voiliers with Jean-Olivier Héron, which became a financial failure.

[3] He became an “Artistic Master” for creating this new kind of fully illustrated encyclopaedia with a dynamic layout.

The collection is considered an example of ‘art as part of everyday life’ in the case study research on the so-called “dual postmodern aestheticisation movement”.

[4] According to Hedwige Pasquet, the current president of Gallimard Jeunesse, and Christine Baker, Marchand “liked to upset and destroy, in order to build again […] He couldn’t suffer an error of visual taste or the sin of banality, in a colour, a proportion, a line… […] He had to mold, to control; the ambition of the 18th-century French encyclopaedists was underlying every idea.”[1] In 1999, at the age of 60 and had been working for 27 years at Gallimard, Marchand became a creative director at Hachette,[5] then the head of Hachette Illustrated branch.