Fairy Tale Illustrators: Arthur Rackham on AbeBooks

AbeBooks.com recently posted an article on one of the most popular fairy tale illustrators of all time, Arthur Rackham. First, here's the link to The Magical Illustration of Arthur Rackham. This article is of particular interest to fans because ABE provides cover images from some of Rackham's more obscure titles, a resource I would have loved 10 years ago!

Arthur Rackham manages to incorporate the romantic and the menacing, the sweet and the grotesque into his work, usually finding the perfect balance of all elements to perfectly capture the essence of the tales he illustrates. Of course, he wasn't strictly an illustrator of fairy tales, but his name is still synonymous with them. I could prattle on for days about him, but in the interest of a short entry, I'm almost finished.

Obviously, Rackham is one of my favorite illustrators. I've spent many hours studying and scanning his work to post on SurLaLune over the years from books I've collected. Many of the images appear in the Rackham Illustration Gallery. I have links to book collections of Rackham's illustrations on the right column of the gallery page.

I've also devoted an entire Arthur Rackham Shop to his out-of-copyright work in the SurLaLune CafePress store.

Still, I have to admit, my favorite item I've created has been a pair of shoes on Zazzle. The illustration is for a much more obscure tale, The Old Woman in the Woods. Here's a link to the shoes: No lace and with laces. I don't own these myself yet, but about five pairs have been purchased in the year since I designed them making them a bestseller.