R.E.H.

RGK was enamored with REH as he was with ERB . . .

Conan

Plunder

Kull Triumphant

Ensorcelled

I can never get enough of Krenkel drawings. They are timeless, they are ensorcelled. Even when you look closely and see that some parts aren't drawn all that well, it doesn't matter. Their spell is binding.

One of Thousands

There are thousands of artistic interpretations of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Here's one by Edwin Landseer from 1848.

Mid-Season's Dream

This may not be the traditional time to celebrate midsummer, but by the calendar it's going to be actual mid-season before we know it.

What a lovely poster and graphics for a lovely film.

Bad Dream?

Sometimes the funnies aren't funny. Sometimes they just tell the truth.

Undine

Tying in nicely to the previous post, Undine is a mythological subject that has been given treatment by all the arts, but nowhere more beautifully than the ballet sequence performed by Vera Zorina, choreographed by George Balanchine in the film The Goldwyn Follies in 1938.

This was Goldwyn's first Technicolor film and George Gershwin's last film score before his death. The plot was meaningless, but to be a frame for song and dance.

Vera Zorina was the stage name for Eva Brigitta Hartwig, a beautiful ballerina, actress and choreographer. I can imagine from these photographs that all the stagehands must have been in love with her.

She rises from the pool . . .

and dances on the surface, thanks to a sheet of glass . . .

Above, backed up on set by the American Ballet of the Metropolitan Opera

Technicolor!

Her studio shot below is stunning, is it not?

One of the Great Penmen

I've been on such a harsh deadline for so long now that I forgot what it's like to have a little goof-off time, like making a serious blog post. I have a lot of great stuff already scanned and in a docket, waiting for clean-up and organizing, but haven't had the time.

Well I finally got to this lovely 1901 book, Undine and Aslauga's Knight, illustrated by Harold Nelson, one of the great penmen of the golden age of illustration (I know, that's a lonnnng golden age). Nelson was of the age of Walter Crane and Howard Pyle and H.J. Ford, all who penned in a similar formal way, each with magical results.

I've included a bit of the text here and there, because it too is magical and part of the context of the book design.

Grape Pickers

Laid out in 1914, this is an unfinished pen drawing by Norman Lindsay entitled Grape Pickers. It gives insight to his early working method, with fairly tight pencils. With confidence, later in his life, Lindsay was able to put in details without previously penciling them in.

Be Sure to Get Your Copy Today!

And geez, for just one thin dime . . .

les livres comiques

Cuz, you know, comics have always been a favorite reading material of young men in the military, no matter where they were in the world.

From a post-war New Yorker

65 Cents

It's numbing to think, in any given week of his WWII army life, what my dad could've bought at the PX for a measly 65 cents. And for all I know he did, read 'em and tossed 'em. Of course I know that some weeks he might've been tied up, what with combat and all.

Still, geez, 65 cents.