The Fantasy Book
(1978 - Thames and Hudson) 
(by Franz Rottensteiner) (Two different subtitles seen: "An Illustrated History From Dracula To Tolkein." and "The Ghostly, The Gothic, The Magical, The Unreal".) A late 1970s overview of the Fantasy genre (including Horror) up until that time, with chapters entitled: Gothic Origins, Early Grandmasters Of Fantasy, Themes And Characters, Ghost And Horror Stories In Britain, Horror In The USA, Alternate Worlds, Fantasy And Popular Fiction, The Lighter Side Of Fantasy, The International Contribution, and Fantasy Now. Probably one of the first more mainstream theses, but it's all been done since, and in a much more exciting manner. Yes, there are contemporary art examples, but so much of the book seems to be old woodcuts, not to mention black-&-white photographs (mostly old movie stills). There are almost 20 color pages to relieve the dreariness, but the rest of the book is black-&-white, sometime with another single tone thrown in. I count 75 pages, of the book's 160, dominated by the art, with only half of that being large reproductions - the rest being, at best, thematic gatherings of smaller images. Some of the pieces are excerpts of larger works and there are nearly ten pages where are made black-&-white displays of color paintings. Much of the material is interestingly captioned, but that effort seems to have been left incomplete, with several artists uncredited, and can only be partially explained by the age of some of the works (note that many of the names & page-numbers are collected into the index). The 'well-presented' artists are: Boris Artzybasheff, Hannes Bok, Margaret Brundage*, John Buscema, Bohden Butenko, Ernie Chan, Joseph Clement Coll, Ray Cruz, Richard Dadd, W.W. Denslow, Boris Dolgov, Philippe Druillet, Virgil Finlay, Matt Fox, Frank Kelly Freas, Gervasio Gallado, Francisco Goya, E.T.A. Hoffmann, J. Inton, Josh Kirby, Alexander Leydenfrost, Q. Martin, Edvard Munch, Hans-Ulrich & Ute Osterwalder, Frank Papé, Mervyn Peake (2), Marek Pietrzak, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Lawrence Sterne Stevens, Andrzej Strumillov, Karl Thylman, J.R.R. Tolkien, Julian Tuwim, Helmut Wenske (3) and UNKNOWN ARTIST (9)
* - Note that Brundage's 'well-presented' piece here can additionally be found so in her own collection further up on The List.
Related Books
other Fantasy Art collections
Terror ! / A Pictorial History Of Horror Stories / The Art Of Horror Stories
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) artwork collections
Collectors Press's Fantasy & Horror art collections
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