Sunday, February 13, 2011

Not Without Charm

Andrew Lang was the go-to man for fairy tales in the early 1900s, and his spectrum of color fairy books are classic, not only for the tales gathered from around the world, but also for the beautiful fairy tale art by H.J. Ford, Lancelot Speed and others.

This is a 1930 edition of The Red Fairy Book with the cover and several illustrations by Frederick Richardson, who also did some beautiful work on Queen Zixi of Ix, which you can see over on Mr. Door Tree's blog site. Here, Richardson's illustrations are not as lush or rich as those by some of his contemporaries, but they are certainly not without charm, especially the cover. The rest of this edition was filled in with the original Ford and Speed pen drawings. I'm including one of Ford's at the bottom of this post.







2 comments:

Steve Scott said...

I had no idea this edition existed! Richardson's work is nice, but he's no Ford.

Annie said...

Hi Thom,
I enjoy H.J. Ford's detailed line work and graceful figures throughout the series, but these color illustrations by Richardson are composed nicely. They would probably appear better if the printing was better aligned.