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A Kipling-esque jungle tale by Walter de la Mare with Sidney Sime-esque illustrations by Dorothy Lathrop (1891–1980). The Three Mulla-mulgars was published in 1919 and is another book which can be downloaded at Archive.org. Inevitably (and conveniently), Golden Age Comic Book Stories has two pages of Ms Lathrop’s work including a number of colour plates […]

Penguin is really coming up with the goods these days, living up to their reputation as a house with high standards of cover design, unlike Picador and the shabby way they treated Cormac McCarthy recently.
Ian Fleming’s Bond novels are the latest to receive a makeover with some fabulous art from illustrator Michael Gillette. 2008 is […]

I was rather aggrieved a few weeks ago when I found a copy of James Whitcomb Riley’s The Flying Islands of the Night (1913) at Archive.org. Nice to find a free copy of a rare book but the grievance came as a result of an intention to write something about its illustrator, Franklin Booth (1874–1948), […]

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 […]

The House of Souls (1923). 
Well, a handful anyway. The late RT Gault put a page of Machen cover scans on his book site which also included the excellent Absolute Elsewhere catalogue of “Fantastic, Visionary, and Esoteric Literature in the 1960s and 1970s”. The cover for The House of Souls is a very odd piece by […]

Meggendorfer’s Blatter, Meggendorfer’s Journal, a satirical magazine founded in 1886 by Lothar Meggendorfer. As with Punch and other humorous magazines of the era, much of the humour is lost today (even more so in a foreign tongue) but there’s some fine and stylish illustration on display.

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• The illustrators archive
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The classic absinthe poster from 1896 by T Privat-Livemont (1861–1936), one of the best exponents of the post-Mucha style. Don’t let anyone tell you that using unclad women’s bodies in advertising is a new thing.

And a couple more Mucha-esque examples circa 1900, both credited to “Nover”, from the wide selection of absinthe graphics at the […]

Continuing the theme of the fin de siècle feminine, there’s this bizarre (undated) piece by Marcel Lenoir representing…what? A witch? Some demoness? Or woman in general? Considering the often overt misogyny of the period, the latter interpretation is quite possible; there were more than enough artists prepared to see women as the foundation of all […]

‘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 […]

top left: Bob Pepper (1969); right: David Johnston (1974).
bottom left: Mati Klarwein (1972); right: Gervasio Gallardo (1972).
I wrote about the classic line of fantasy paperbacks in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series last year as part of the post about Bob Pepper’s illustration:
It was the success of the publication of The Lord of the Rings in […]