Weird and Wonderful: Discoveries From The Mysterious World Of Forgotten Children'S Books (Golden Age of Illustration) - Softcover

Poltarnees, Welleran

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1595833854 ISBN 13: 9781595833853

Publisher: Laughing Elephant, 2010

Synopsis

In his years of collecting and cataloging the vast Green Tiger library of classic children’s picture books, editor Welleran Poltarnees has singled out scenes containing particularly unusual images and situations and he has compiled the best and rarest of these discoveries in Weird and Wonderful. The results are both engaging and delightful and reveal a world of children’s books where imagination is given free rein. Artists and authors include Frank Baum, Edward Lear, Gelett Burgess, Peter Newell, John R. Neill and Charles Doyle.

About this title

About the Author

WELLERAN POLTARNEES has a lifelong love of gardens. His first memory is falling out of his baby carriage and landing on a bed of odorous white flowers which not only kept him from injury, but made the experience a sensual delight. He collects books about, and pictures of, gardens -- but there are few timeless things that he does not so honor. He uses a book called Great Gardens of the World as a guide whenever he travels, and, with the exception of the Boboli Gardens in Florence, which came highly recommended and which he found monotonous -- the gardens have always refreshed him. His favorite time for gardens is night. His favorite garden music is Manuel De Falla's ""Nights in the Gardens of Spain"", and his favorite garden poem is ""The Garden"" by Andrew Marvell.

Review

Drawn from the archives of the Blue Lantern Studio (Poltarnees is a pen name for Blue Lantern cofounder Harold Darling) this compilation of excerpts and illustrations from 19th- and early 20th-century picture books should captivate connoisseurs and curious young readers with an artistic bent. Palmer Cox’s Brownies make an appearance, as do offerings from Johnny Gruelle, Edward Lear, and Dorothy Kunhardt, but most of the images are little-known rarities from the vault, often paired with the verse that accompanied them. Every page holds a surprise: a 1916 work by Hazel Frazee has a pair of elegant “chocolate ladies” playing dominoes, while an anonymous 1884 illustration depicts a hive of winged capital letter Bs carrying signs that read “cheerful,” “penitent,” etc. Poltarnees’s brief, glowing commentary is largely superfluous (“The Swiss artist Ernst Kreidolf, in a wonderfully consistent body of work, shows us the wonderful beings who inhabit the world of plants”), as the whimsical, bizarre, and sometimes nightmarish illustrations stand alone as fascinating relics of bygone eras in children’s publishing. Readers will likely long for more of the beguiling images: luckily, as Poltarnees notes in his introduction, “There are thousands more buried in our library.”

Publisher's Weekly, June 2010

Thanks to Weird and Wonderful, I now know what one book I would take with me to a desert island.
-Tom Robbins (author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Still Life with Woodpecker, and many more).

 

This incredible collection of enchanting and magical artwork is my favorite book of 2010.
  -Glen Baxter  (author of Atlas, Blizzards of Tweed, Meurtes à La Table de Billard, among others)

 

 

About this edition

• Publisher: Laughing Elephant
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1595833854
• ISBN 13: 9781595833853
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112