Sidney Sime - Master Of The Mysterious
                                             (1980 - Thames & Hudson)  

     (by Simon Heneage & Henry Ford)  I'd like to see the other couple of books that have been produced about this artist, before I'd be confident that this one was worthy to point interested people too.  I think I'd rather see this art reproduced on coated glossy white paper, for the additional contrast it would lend to his particular, cramped & crowded grey-scale works.  There are 58 plates, each of which are captioned with the title, the publication that the illustration was for, and a relevant passage from it.  Then there are another 10 pages where one or more drawings are still the central focus (interestingly, there's a caricature of the artist by Max Beerbohm slipped in here).  The remaining 28 pages are mostly text about his life & career, along with a bibliography and an index.  The delightful images collected here are mostly from his illustrations for the books of Lord Dunsany - full of fairy villages, castles, ruins, cottages in the forest, highwaymen, indians, pirates, caliphs, unicorns, sphinxes, centaurs and any number of other mysterious beasts. There is a bit of female nudity, but one hopes that we're not *more* prudish than they were in Britain at the turn of the previous century.

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