{books} – Page 471 – { feuilleton }

Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal

La Déstruction.

More Symbolist femmes fatale, this time courtesy of Carlos Schwabe (1866–1926) and his illustrations for Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal from 1900. I’d had the site these pictures are from bookmarked for some time but hadn’t noticed that the version of Schwabe’s Spleen et Ideal illustration (below) was different to the one more commonly seen in books of Symbolist art. In fact the more common picture is about the only one of these illustrations that turns up at all in books. (It also appeared on a UK edition of Baudelaire’s poems, as I recall.) Schwabe is more usually represented by his mystically-inspired paintings and drawings, especially those he produced for the Salon de la Rose+Croix; on the strength of some of his Baudelairean pieces I’d say he’s a worthy companion to Félicien Rops.

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Dedalus flies again

Dedalus flies again
| Publisher finds a new set of wings.

Sidney Sime and Lord Dunsany

‘We would gallop through Africa’ from A Dreamer’s Tales.

More from the book scans at the Internet Archive. 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 influence on the early stories of HP Lovecraft who once divided his literary output into his Poe pieces and his Dunsany pieces. Dunsany found an ideal illustrator in Sidney Sime who started out as a Beardsley pasticheur but developed his own slightly comical variant on the kind of exotica favoured by Edmund Dulac and Kay Nielsen.

Of the Dunsany/Sime books, Archive.org has The Sword of Welleran (1908), A Dreamer’s Tales (1910), The Book of Wonder (1912) and Tales of Wonder (1916). These stories are frequently too whimsical for my tastes—I’ve never been very keen on Lovecraft’s Dunsany pieces either—but they’re still worth a look for anyone interested in the lighter side of 20th century fantasy.

‘The City of Never’ from The Book of Wonder.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• HP Lovecraft’s favourite artists

Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers

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 America which inspired Betty Ballantine to publish a line of fantasy classics in the late Sixties. The series began its run in 1969 and continued until 1974. Lin Carter was commissioned as editor and given free reign to choose any title he thought might be suitable with the result that many of the books in the series—obscurities such as Lud-in-the-mist by Hope Mirrlees—received their first paperback publication. Carter also reprinted personal favourites which frequently shifted from fantasy to outright horror, such as the titles from HP Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson. The range and scope of this line is what makes the series so notable today and the books have become highly-collectable as a result.

I’m fairly sure this page of cover scans of the BAF series wasn’t there when I was searching for Pepper covers. Whether it was or not, it contains a lot of Bob Pepper artwork I hadn’t seen before at large size, plus a substantial number of the other covers. I was never all that taken with Gervasio Gallardo’s work which took the lion’s share of the illustration duties but the passage of time has lent his paintings and their florid title designs the distinction of being emblematic of the era. And some of the rest are still pretty decent covers.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Bob Pepper
• Fantastic art from Pan Books

The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937

‘Fair and False’, Songs and Sonnets by William Shakespeare (1915).

More illustrated gems from the collection of books at the Internet Archive. 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 many examples available in the Internet Archive, so here’s a brief selection from different books. If you only look at one of these, his oft-reprinted edition of A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson is especially fine. There’s a distinct Art Nouveau flavour to much of Charles Robinson’s work and he also devoted more attention to page layout than his younger brother, many of his drawings being presented within sinuous frames and augmented by some very elegant lettering. If they haven’t been digitised already at Fontcraft’s Scriptorium, some of these type designs would make great fonts.

A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson (1895).

Lullaby-land : Songs of Childhood by Eugene Field (1897).

Fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen (1899).

‘The Red Shoes’, Fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen (1899).

The Story of the Weathercock by Evelyn Sharp (1907).

The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde (1913).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive