Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Art - Fairy & Folk Tales Illustration

I have quite a few large format books on fairy & folk tales. Some are collections , like World Tales, which is actually very interesting in the selection of the tales and in the illustrations that accompany each tale, executed by different artists. The below illustration is by Sue Porter for Tales of A Parrot - a fairy tale from India.

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Another collection of various fairy stories illustrated by the master Arthur Rackham.

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A book on the life and art of Arthur Rackham

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Next a collection of Victorian Fairy Tales and Swedish Fairy Tales illustrated by John Bauer.

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Moonlight & Fairyland is a beautiful edition of fairy tales written by Laurence Housman.

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Snow White translated by Randall Jarrell & delicately illustrated by Ekholm Burket and a book on the graphic illustrations of Walter Crane.

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The following book is a sort of large chapbook edition of Beauty & The Beast illustrated by Michael Hague. Below is the front page with accompanying illustration. The high resolution pictures are tipped in adding class to what is really a very lovely book.

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And finally, a collection of stories by Alan Garner about fools called The Guizer - A Book of Fools. This book for some reason reminds me of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker - it has that same primitive strangeness about it.

I've always been taken with the epigraph to the book - words spoken by the Eskimo Anarulunguaq, when he stood on the roof of a skyscraper overlooking New York.

"I see things more than my mind can grasp; and the only way to save oneself from madness is to suppose that we have all died suddenly before we knew, and that this is part of another life"

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Coming next - pop culture.

2 comments:

Libby said...

Actually, Anarulunguaq was a woman. She traveled from 1921-1924 across arctic America, from Greenland to the west coast of Alaska, by dogsled. She made the trip as lover and partner to Knud Rasmussen, a Danish Greenlandic Anthropologist. From Alaska, they traveled together by boat to Seattle, then through the Panama Canal to New York, and home again. She became, therefore, probably the most widely traveled Inuit person of the time, and one of the most incredible women ever. The journey is related in Knud Rasmussen's book, Across Arctic America.

Anne S said...

Libby,

Thankyou so much for enlighting me to the true sex of Anarulunguaq, I was only going by the book literally, which gave no indication of the sex of the person making the comment, which indeed made a deep impression on me when I first read it.

I will definitely seek out more information on Anarulunguaq - she sounds quite fabulous.