Charles Robinson’s King Longbeard

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For proof that it’s worth persevering with the eccentric tagging or non-labelling at the Internet Archive, look no further than this tremendous edition of King Longbeard (1898) by Barrington MacGregor which features some astonishing illustrations by Charles Robinson. The illustrator’s name isn’t attached to the book files, I found this by cross-referencing, something I’ve been doing a lot of in order to find other books about design history. I’ve written about Robinson’s work before but I was still taken aback by some of these drawings, a handful of which verge on outright Surrealism. The two monkeys peering at a giant head is one I’ve seen reproduced elsewhere, although I couldn’t say where, so it’s good to be able to find the source at last. I haven’t read through any of the stories so the explanation of that scene remains a mystery. If you want the solution then the book files are here (click the “All files: HTTP” link for the full set).

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937

2 thoughts on “Charles Robinson’s King Longbeard”

  1. The real catalog record for this book is found here:
    http://ia331305.us.archive.org/2/items/kinglongbeardora00macgiala/kinglongbeardora00macgiala_marc.xml this is the cataloging information provided by the library that owned the book that was scanned, and
    this does note that Charles Robinson is the illustrator; I don’t really understand why perfectly useful information like this is frequently not displayed or indexed by the internet archive.
    this page: http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7114447M/King_Longbeard
    which gives a more complete bibliographic presentation of the information.

  2. Hi Rick, and thanks. I don’t mind searching around, actually, you often make unexpected discoveries that way, but for other people it would help if illustrators were tagged more thoroughly, I’ve found several that aren’t.

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