The Zankiwank & the Bletherwitch

A Very Good+ copy. Small octavo (7 5/8 x 5 1/2 in; 193 x 140 mm). xii, 188 pp. Seventeen full-page and twenty-four black and white text illustrations. Original dark green cloth pictorially stamped and lettered in gilt. Top edge gilt, others untrimmed. Slight wear at the spine ends and extremities. A previous owner's name and date written on the front free end paper. Light to moderate foxing, heaviest at the preliminary and terminal leaves. A significant copy of Rackham's first book featuring "fantastic" creatures that would come to define his signature style. "It is. with the illustrations for The Zankiwank and the Bletherwitch that the true Rackham fantasy begins to emerge consistently, and this might well be called the first good Rackham. Even the subtitle [on the half-title only] of this book augurs well for Rackham, as it is described as 'An Original Fantastic Fairy Extravaganza,' and as the titlepage demonstrates, there is almost no limit to how extravagant the illustrator might be. There is no color in this book, but its forty [one] line illustrations reveal a new Rackham to the world." (Gettings). "Here, in the imaginative silhouettes of the attenuated, weirdly double-jointed ostrich-like figure of the Zankiwank, Arthur is finding a commercial, even a career outlet, for the 'fantastic and the imaginative' which had preoccupied him from an early age" (Hamilton). Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) is perhaps the most acclaimed and influential illustrator of the Golden Age of Illustration. A prolific artist even from his youth, Rackham got his start as an illustrator working for the Westminster Budget Newspaper (1892). Over the next few years, he took on more and more commissions for children's books, hitting his career high in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Rackham turned his imaginative pen to every classic-from Shakespeare to Dickens to Poe. Latimore and Haskell, p. 8. Riall, p. 15. Hudson, p. 166. Gettings, p. 173. Very Good +.…