London: William Heinemann, [1913]. First trade edition. Collating 43, [1]. Publisher's gray-green cloth, front cover and spine pictorially stamped and lettered in gilt, top edge stained gray. Very slight discoloration on free end-papers from paste-downs. Ink name partially erased from the bookplate design on front paste-down, otherwise a very Fine copy in the original brown paper dust jacket printed in black (with the first issue price of "15/ - Net" on spine). A few small and neat repairs to extremities of dust jacket. Forty-four color plates (including frontispiece) mounted on tan paper, with descriptive tissue guards, and ten drawings in black and white.

Rackham’s Book of Pictures is a collection of illustrations that fully encapsulates the artist’s classic style: From goblins and fairies to mystical atmospheric landscapes, there's an image to suit everyone's tastes in this survey. The introduction by Arthur Quiller-Couch set’s out the books contents—not a biography but a celebration of Rackham's artistry. Rackham initially approached J. M. Barrie to write the introduction, but dude to scheduling conflicts Barrie turned down the offer and Arthur Quiller-Couch was found as a replacement. Not only did he admire “Rackham's work; he also thoroughly understood a child's instinctive longing for the imaginative and fanciful. 'To this instant, constant, intellectual need of childhood no one in our day,' he wrote, 'has ministered so bountifully or so whole-heartedly as Mr. Rackham.' And Quiller-Couch was happy, too, in associating the random, impressionistic nature of much of the Book of Pictures with 'the wayward visions that tease every true artist's mind, while he bends over the day's work'" (Hudson).

Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) is perhaps the most acclaimed and influential illustrators 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 41-42. Riall 118. (Item #3732)