Collectorz book collector maximum bksoo12/25/2023 On the European side, you had Rackham, Harry Clarke, Kay Nielsen, Willy Pogany, W. At the beginning of this period, there were illustrators like Gustave Doré, Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle, and the American Brandywine School, which included great artists like N.C. The golden age of illustration was from 1880 to 1930. Where would Lewis Carroll’s brilliant Alice in Wonderland be, for example, without John Tenniel’s illustrations? If we look at editions of Alice in Wonderland today, I wouldn’t even hazard a guess at how many artists, including surrealist painter Salvador Dali and the great British illustrator Arthur Rackham, created their own interpretations of the book. And of course they were paid terribly, too. All those artists toiled anonymously.ĭisney just stamped his name on everything, and I can understand that from a marketing and branding point of view, but to deprive individual artists of public acknowledgment, I think, is shameful. Disney did the same thing to Floyd Gottfredson, who created Mickey Mouse, and Walt Kelly, who worked on the film Fantasia. Intuitively, I knew the artwork was good, but I didn’t know until I was an adult that Carl Barks had produced the duck illustrations and that Walt Disney had taken credit for everything. I collected the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics, too. I discovered the Walt Kelly Pogo comic strips and books, and I came awfully close to buying all 40 of the Oz books.Įdmund Dulac is one of many illustrators who was attracted to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I read a lot of literature, but it was the pictures that got me into the books I seriously collected. Sanders: I definitely think so, and I think that came out of my interest in comic books. Collectors Weekly: Are you attracted to the illustrations in a book first? Later my interests blossomed into books from the golden age of illustration by the great American and European illustrators, including Maxfield Parrish and Arthur Rackham. He also created the old Atlas and Marvel horror comics in the ’50s. The artist Steve Ditko, who created Spider-Man and Dr. Spider-Man wasn’t an invincible superhero like Superman, and that had a huge appeal for an adolescent male. Peter Parker/Spider-Man was this superhero by night and a nerdy high school kid who was afraid of girls during the day. But then, about 1960-ish or so, the Marvel Superheroes came out- Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men. As a young kid, I was a monster nut I ate up Frankenstein, Dracula, and Wolfman. I also loved science fiction, horror, and mystery books. I fell in love with the artwork, and I bought a big folio edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” with engravings by Gustav Dore. Turns out she only illustrated two books-Alice and Peter Pan. At the time I had no idea the artist was a Welsh woman named Gwynedd Hudson. I was in heaven.īertrand Smith let me into the rare book room, and I bought a Maxwell Parrish “Arabian Nights.” I bought an Alice in Wonderland just for the illustrations. My grandfather sat outside the store smoking Camel cigarettes in his 1950s battleship gray Ford while I went through this bookstore for hours on end. We did the Knott’s Berry Farm and Disneyland thing, but I begged my grandfather to take me to Bertrand Smith’s Acres of Books in Long Beach, California. When I was 14, my grandparents took my little brother and me to Southern California to see our other grandfather. By junior high, I was a pretty serious book collector. I also loved comic books, and was wheeling and dealing them as a child-buying them for a nickel, sell them for dime. In grade school, I devoured library books. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t read books. The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, 1975, is a landmark novel, but a healthy print run has kept first-edition copies like this one within reach of collectors.
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