{ feuilleton }

Myths of the World (1930).
Boris Artzybasheff’s humorous illustrations of anthropomorphic machines have received a lot of attention from Boing Boing recently. But Artzybasheff was a very versatile artist, not a one-trick pony, and his book and other magazine illustration is worth a look as well. These examples are from the indispensable VTS. Some of his […]

‘We would gallop through Africa’ from A Dreamer’s Tales. 
More from the book scans at Archive.org. Lord Dunsany was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany and a writer of a number of fantasy tales beginning with The Gods of Pegana in 1905. His work is notable these days for having been a huge […]

‘Fair and False’, Songs and Sonnets by William Shakespeare (1915).
More illustrated gems from the PDF collection at Archive.org. Charles Robinson, as mentioned earlier, was the older brother of illustrator William Heath (there was also a third illustrator brother in the family, Thomas). Charles was so prolific it’s difficult to choose one work over the […]

I wasn’t planning on featuring W Heath Robinson again so soon but I couldn’t resist posting some extracts from his 1914 edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, another great PDF download from the scanned books at Archive.org. I have a few of these illustrations in a WHR monograph but I didn’t realise the book as […]

Going through stacks of old artwork today turned up a photocopy of a drawing I did in 1990, my sole attempt to illustrate HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. By the time I did this I was pretty exhausted by Lovecraft’s world and was already at work on the first phase of the Lord […]

Another gem from the Archive.org collection of PDF scans from American libraries. This edition of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe from 1900 was illustrated by William Heath Robinson (1872–1944), an artist whose later cartoons of quirky inventions have completely overshadowed his earlier books and the work of his equally talented older brother, Charles. I’m […]

Another Archive.org discovery, this is a PDF copy of one of Austin Spare’s first illustrated works. Behind the Veil was a small book of mystical fiction by Ethel Rolt Wheeler, published in 1906. Spare was only 20 at the time and the drawings, while accomplished, lack the finesse of his later work. They also owe […]

“This dark and steep alley took its name from Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees, Lord Advocate of Scotland, 1692–1713, whose mansion stood at the foot of the close. It was a fashionable quarter in the early 18th century, and here resided Andrew Crosby, the famous lawyer, the original of Scott’s ‘Andrew Pleydell,’ Lord Westhall, John […]

Archive.org seems to be improving as a resource for out-of-copyright books. Browsing there this week it’s become apparent that a number of recent additions include rare illustrated titles which can be downloaded as PDFs. Project Gutenberg has the quantity where free books are concerned but their quality leaves much to be desired when it comes […]

So the first book purchase of the year turns out to be the original Dover edition of Beardsley and Wilde’s Salomé. This appeared in 1967, a year after the major V&A exhibition which introduced Beardsley’s work to a new generation and commenced the Beardsley craze that lasted into the Seventies. Not that I’m in desperate […]