Sheharazade (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: g. Limited Edition. 1/800 copies. 8vo. 346pp. Original vellum bindung with gold and blue lettering to cover and spine. Top edge gilt. Remnants of clasp. Gold endpapers. Frontispiece, protected by tissue guard. Magnificently illustrated with 50 tipped-in reproductions of water color images by the renowned illustrator Edmond Dulac (1882-1953), all protected by captioned tissue guards. Edmund (born Edmond) Dulac was a book illustrator prominent during the so called "Golden Age of Illustration" (the first quarter or so of the twentieth century). A wonderful translation of the Arabian Nights/Thousand and One Night into German. Thousand and One Night is a classic collection of stories bound together by one frame story, similar to Foccacio's Decamerone, with which it has often been compared. Spine chipped and damaged. Boards bowed. Scuffing, rubbing, staining to boards and spine. Remnants of clasp at boards, with clasp missing. Ex-libris plate to inside of front board. Tissue guard of frontispiece torn but complete. In German. Binding in fair, book in very good condition. Edmund (born Edmond) Dulac was a book illustrator prominent during the so called "Golden Age of Illustration" (the first quarter or so of the twentieth century). He was among the youngest of this generation of illustrators that includes, among others, Arthur Rackham. Born in Toulouse, France, he moved to London in 1904. It's important to understand the timing of Dulac's arrival in London. Until the mid-1890s, there had been no economical method of reproducing color plates. Printing methods in those days varied from printer to printer and were most often patented - and were always being improved. The invention of the process we now call "color separation" made it possible to mass-produce color images and by 1905 they improved the process to create images that were very faithful to the originals. The only drawback was that they had to be printed on a special coated paper and therefore couldn't be bound into the book with the rest of the pages. They had to be tipped-in. One of the earliest manifestations of this was the Arthur Rackham's Rip Van Winkle in 1905. The illustrated gift-book was born just as Edmund Dulac arrived. Rackham was a grizzled veteran of ten years in the illustration business and Dulac was looking for his first assignment. How odd that these two men would dominate the new market.