Illustrations to Shakepears “A Midsummer Nights Dream” by Elsie M Starling. Published in the early 1900′s (exact date is unkown) Download the entire book HERE

Thomas Mackenzie was an illustrator from Bradford England working in the early part of the 20th century. His style is very reminiscent of his more famous contemporary Kay Nielsen. The images presented here are taken from his 1919 illustrations for Arthur Ransomes “Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp” . As well as the fabulous colour images [...]

These images are taken from the book Silesian Folk Tales; (The Book of Rubezahl), by James Lee & James T. Carey. Published in 1915 by the American Book Company of New York, it was illustrated by an unkown artist by the name of C.F. Arcier. It appears that this fantastic artist remained unkown as I [...]

Aucassin et Nicolette is a medieval French chante-fable, (mixture of of prose and verse or a “sung story”). It is the only known chantefable from what was once a very popular literary tradition, and it is from this work the term chantefable was coined in its concluding lines: “No cantefable prent fin” (“Our chantefable is [...]

Francis Quarles ‘Emblems’ is a book of moral and religious verse first published in 1635. To be honest, the text content of the book is enought to send anyone to sleep (imo), but if you are into that kind of thing you might find it interesting. The real interesting thing about this book is its [...]

Anne Anderson was a Scottish illustrator of children’s books and fairy tales. She spent her childhood in Argentina and in 1912 she married illustrator Alan Wright (with whom she collaborated on many bookssome of her work) and they settled in Berkshire. Her work has been compared to contemporaries such as Mabel Lucie Atwell (see Alice [...]

Following on from my last post on Alice in Wonderland, I thought I would check out Lewis Carroll’s other work to see if there was anything interesting to be found illustartion wise. Most people aren’t even aware of anything else writen by Carroll such is the fame of the “Alice” stories. In fact he had [...]

Given the currently popularity of everything “Alice” following the recent movie release, I thought I would have a dig around online and see if I could find some original book illustrations. There’s plenty of stuff to be found on the subject but this page: http://ufdcweb1.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc/?a=alice&m=hbball at the University of Florida’s digital collections, is about the [...]

Émile Prisse d’Avesnes ‘ was a French scholar and something of a ‘jack of all trades’ whose most notable acheivements were in the field of Egyptology.  From 1827 to 1844 d’Avesnes lived in Egypt, teaching cartography and working as an engineer for a time, but eventually he devoted himself to his passion, documenting and studying [...]

Die Nibelungen is an epic poem central to German Mythology. The most interesting thing about it is the 1909 interpretation of it by Frank Keim brilliantly illustrated by Carl Otto Czeschka. Some of finest art nouveau book illustration you will come across. …Check it out art lovers: Download a free 300 dpi pdf page scan [...]