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Mother West Wind (1918).
The first thought which comes to mind when looking at these beautiful prints is to wonder why American artist Bertha Lum isn’t more well-known, she had a particularly fondness for fluid lines and swirling arabesques as in the example above. There is at least a wealth of detail about her career online, [...]

Louis Rhead (1916).
Continuing from the weekend’s book discovery, a browse at Archive.org reveals many PDF editions of the Arabian Nights. No surprise given the enduring popularity of the stories, and no surprise either that the texts are of variable quality, most of them diluted from the earthy and inventive originals to the status of the [...]

This weekend’s book purchase looks like an expensive volume but was actually pretty reasonably-priced for a book that’s 126 years old. This is no. III of a three-volume set of the Thousand and One Nights translated by Edward William Lane, published by Chatto & Windus in 1883. I bought it mainly for the copious wood [...]

“Rosalie saw before her eyes a tree of marvellous beauty” from Old French Fairy Tales.
Continuing the series of occasional posts mining the scanned library books at Archive.org, these illustrations are from a 1920 edition of Old French Fairy Tales by Comtesse Sophie de Ségur and a 1921 volume of Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne. [...]

Previous posts about etchings and engravings.

• The Triumph of the Phallus

• The art of Oleg Denysenko

• Nicoletto Giganti’s naked duellists

• Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales

• Jan Saenredam’s whale

• Digital alchemy

• Oeuvres D’Architecture by Jean Le Pautre

• Gramato-graphices

• Edward William Lane’s Arabian Nights Entertainments

• John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems

• Battle of the Naked [...]

The Dynamiter: More New Arabian Nights (Longmans, London; 1914).
I’ve mentioned before that I’m a sporadic collector of the Tusitala Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s works, 35 small blue volumes published by Heinemann, London in 1924. I’ve found 15 of them so far and today turned up another one, volume 25, Virginibus [...]

“Everything about her was white.” Illustration by Edmund Dulac for
The Dreamer of Dreams by Queen Marie of Roumania (1915).
A major exhibition of British fantasy illustration opens at the Dulwich Picture Gallery this Wednesday, running to February 17th, 2008. Considering the huge resurgence of popularity in fantasy for children I’m surprised none of the UK galleries [...]

Previous posts about illustrators.

• Dalí in Wonderland

• The Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest

• Der Orchideengarten illustrated

• Equus and the Executionist

• Mervyn Peake at Maison d’Ailleurs

• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

• The art of Raphaël Freida

• The art of Bertha Lum, 1869–1954

• The art of George Barbier, 1882–1932

• The art of Warwick Goble, 1862–1943

• Steinlen’s cats

• [...]

A few drawings by British illustrator John Austen (1886–1948), like Patten Wilson another artist whose work is hard to come by today. Austen was one of the many young illustrators over whom Aubrey Beardsley’s etiolated shadow fell from 1900 onwards and it’s the first ten years of Austen’s work I find most interesting, mainly because [...]