1 00:00:00,210 --> 00:00:03,870 So welcome to this instalment of the Oxford Fantasy podcast. 2 00:00:03,870 --> 00:00:11,580 I'm Dr. Caroline Batten, and I am here today with Emma Sillett, who is a librarian at Trinity College working with the Danson Collection. 3 00:00:11,580 --> 00:00:18,210 And she's going to take us through some really exciting Arthur Rackham illustrations in some beautiful volumes the library holds. 4 00:00:18,210 --> 00:00:25,200 Take it away, Emma. Well, welcome. First of all, to the Danson library, which is something of a hidden jewel in Trinity College, Oxford. 5 00:00:25,200 --> 00:00:29,550 And I'm really excited that we're going to be talking about a small but spellbinding 6 00:00:29,550 --> 00:00:35,120 collection of Arthur Rackham illustrated books and talking through some of our favourites. 7 00:00:35,120 --> 00:00:40,040 Awesome. Well, to sort of kick us off, would you tell us a little bit about Arthur Rackham? 8 00:00:40,040 --> 00:00:47,450 Who is he? What's his back story? Catch us up. So Arthur Rackham was an intriguing figure. 9 00:00:47,450 --> 00:00:56,630 He was born in eighteen sixty seven into a large, respectable middle class family, and he had something of a double life in his early years. 10 00:00:56,630 --> 00:01:02,960 He started off as an insurance clerk at the Westminster fire office by day and by night, 11 00:01:02,960 --> 00:01:08,930 he was a student at the London School of Art. His career as an artist kicked off in the 1890s. 12 00:01:08,930 --> 00:01:18,710 He's doing some scrap work, as he called it, drawing the great and good of Victorian Society for periodicals like the Pall Mall Budget, the Westminster Gazette. 13 00:01:18,710 --> 00:01:28,100 But it was his wife, the portraitist, Edyth Starkie, who encouraged him to start exhibiting his fantasy art and to pursue his passion for book illustration. 14 00:01:28,100 --> 00:01:31,820 Since the late 1890s, he published many, many books. 15 00:01:31,820 --> 00:01:42,270 He was prolific and unusually for an illustrator he was profitable as well, and he worked right up until his death in 1939 at the age of 72. 16 00:01:42,270 --> 00:01:46,170 So tell me a little bit more about his wife and her encouragement of his work, then, 17 00:01:46,170 --> 00:01:55,440 because that's – so often we find with with authors like this that there's somebody else sort of encouraging, gently nudging. 18 00:01:55,440 --> 00:01:59,550 I'm thinking in particular, you know, we were looking at Tales from Shakespeare earlier. 19 00:01:59,550 --> 00:02:04,140 I'm thinking of the way Charles and Mary Lamb kind of worked worked together. 20 00:02:04,140 --> 00:02:14,280 Yeah. So definitely a collaborative element there. And certainly Rackham was one of the first book illustrators to exhibit his work in galleries. 21 00:02:14,280 --> 00:02:16,320 And that was something that Edyth promoted. 22 00:02:16,320 --> 00:02:23,370 And that actually became something which other artists like Edmund Dulac later took up, so also quite influential in his career. 23 00:02:23,370 --> 00:02:27,350 So she encouraged him to sort of treat it as proper artwork. Exactly. 24 00:02:27,350 --> 00:02:37,590 So, yeah. Oh, very cool. So how does that fit in then to the sort of history of book illustration, book production? 25 00:02:37,590 --> 00:02:41,280 What sort of sea change is he is showing us? 26 00:02:41,280 --> 00:02:48,960 I think Arthur Rackham was so important because he really helped to elevate the status of children's book illustrations to a respected art form. 27 00:02:48,960 --> 00:02:54,000 He was the pre-eminent figure in what's become known as the Golden Age of Book Illustration, 28 00:02:54,000 --> 00:02:58,560 which spans from the late Victorian period up until the outbreak of the First World War. 29 00:02:58,560 --> 00:03:02,340 As we talked about, he'd exhibited his work and he sold the original artwork. 30 00:03:02,340 --> 00:03:08,040 And this in turn generated hype and attracted subscribers as well to his new books. 31 00:03:08,040 --> 00:03:10,780 In terms of books themselves, as we'll have a look, 32 00:03:10,780 --> 00:03:18,420 they had unusually high production values. Rackham believed, and this is something which is quoted in his notes, 'Nothing 33 00:03:18,420 --> 00:03:25,110 less than the best that can be had is good enough for those early impressionable years.' As children's books go, 34 00:03:25,110 --> 00:03:33,030 these are fancy children's books and in fact, they're gift books and were commonly gifted around Christmas time in particular. 35 00:03:33,030 --> 00:03:38,640 So shall we have a look at one? Yes, actually, this is the Ingoldsby Legends. 36 00:03:38,640 --> 00:03:44,370 This is one of his earlier illustrated works and it's a deluxe edition. 37 00:03:44,370 --> 00:03:51,720 And I'm sure you can see it or as we describe it, everything about it in an official and in a tactile sense bespeaks quality. 38 00:03:51,720 --> 00:03:58,920 So if you look at the binding, you can see it's in this very pale, even coloured vellum or treated animal skin. 39 00:03:58,920 --> 00:04:05,730 It's got gilt or gold inlay lettering and illustrations and decorations on the binding. 40 00:04:05,730 --> 00:04:12,120 And even the text block or the the top of the pages is gilded. 41 00:04:12,120 --> 00:04:19,200 And you can see we've got these amazing silk ties which don't always survive on copies, but we're lucky to have one here as well. 42 00:04:19,200 --> 00:04:27,880 And then opening the book, we have decorated and papers with an illustration there. 43 00:04:27,880 --> 00:04:34,300 Paging through, you can see here the limited edition statement. So this says, of the large paper 44 00:04:34,300 --> 00:04:39,190 edition of the Ingoldsby Legends, only five hundred and sixty copies have been printed, 45 00:04:39,190 --> 00:04:43,360 of which five hundred are for sale in England and 50 in America. 46 00:04:43,360 --> 00:04:48,220 This is number four hundred and fifty three and it's signed by the illustrator. 47 00:04:48,220 --> 00:04:55,000 Wow. And then you can see we've got colour illustrations and we've got a piece of tissue guarding it. 48 00:04:55,000 --> 00:05:03,670 And then we've got the title page in colour with a foliate sort of Pre-Raphaelite arts and crafts style border with lots and lots of detail there. 49 00:05:03,670 --> 00:05:12,010 And so they're rather magnificent objects. And the other thing to say in terms of their importance as an art form is that 50 00:05:12,010 --> 00:05:17,470 Rackham was really taking advantage of a new technological innovation in publishing, 51 00:05:17,470 --> 00:05:21,520 which was the three colour printing process. 52 00:05:21,520 --> 00:05:34,210 So you can see here, I hope, that we have an illustration on printed glossy photographic paper that's been pasted or tipped in onto art paper, 53 00:05:34,210 --> 00:05:42,160 which is bound in within the book. So they really stand out as illustrations in their own right that you can identify throughout the book. 54 00:05:42,160 --> 00:05:47,820 And of course, that adds to the production costs, but also to the perceived value of these books as well. 55 00:05:47,820 --> 00:05:57,370 Mm hmm. So what are the Ingoldsby Legends and what kind of books did he tend to illustrate? 56 00:05:57,370 --> 00:06:06,160 Well, the Ingoldsby Legends are a series of stories written by a pseudonymous Ingoldsby author. 57 00:06:06,160 --> 00:06:10,360 And this is kind of typical of the text that Rackham liked to illustrate. 58 00:06:10,360 --> 00:06:18,130 So legends, epics, fairy tales, that's all very common Rackham territory. 59 00:06:18,130 --> 00:06:24,450 And there's really a thread of fantasy that runs throughout everything more or less that Rackham illustrates. 60 00:06:24,450 --> 00:06:29,920 So as well as these, we have English Fairy Tales, Irish Fairy Tales, 61 00:06:29,920 --> 00:06:37,360 Tales of the Brothers Grimm, that's very popular, one that was really instrumental in building his reputation. 62 00:06:37,360 --> 00:06:44,710 You have the more legendary epic texts like Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. 63 00:06:44,710 --> 00:06:48,820 We have the Morte D'Arthur, or we have an abridged version of it. 64 00:06:48,820 --> 00:06:52,840 He also illustrated some of the literary greats like Shakespeare. 65 00:06:52,840 --> 00:06:57,130 So he illustrated Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, 66 00:06:57,130 --> 00:07:01,870 which is a compendium for children and also some of the some of the plays, some of the more fantastical ones anyway. 67 00:07:01,870 --> 00:07:11,020 So Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. And he also took on Alice in Wonderland, which is quite a brave artistic decision. 68 00:07:11,020 --> 00:07:23,020 It went out to copyright and he immediately published an illustrated edition in 1907, which wasn't something that received universal critical acclaim. 69 00:07:23,020 --> 00:07:29,170 I think there was a lot of a lot of loyalty towards Tenniel's illustrations, which are seen as definitive. 70 00:07:29,170 --> 00:07:35,010 But now Rackham's illustrations are almost equally highly regarded in their own right. 71 00:07:35,010 --> 00:07:43,650 And that's fascinating. It is brave to take on Alice in Wonderland immediately after Tenniel's just done it because he is quite brilliant. 72 00:07:43,650 --> 00:07:49,950 So how would we describe, then, his style? What's sort of fantastic about it, what makes it suited to fantasy? 73 00:07:49,950 --> 00:07:51,780 I think it's a surprisingly varied style. 74 00:07:51,780 --> 00:08:01,140 I can show you some characteristic Rackhamesque styles, and I guess you could characterise them as a curious mixture of the grotesque and the delicate. 75 00:08:01,140 --> 00:08:09,480 So let me show you Rackham's Comus, which was published in nineteen twenty one. 76 00:08:09,480 --> 00:08:16,610 And hopefully you'll be able to see and we can describe what I mean by that. 77 00:08:16,610 --> 00:08:30,330 So. We just paging through here, you can see the inkiness of them, the grotesque, gnarled, very expressive faces, 78 00:08:30,330 --> 00:08:39,320 the fantastical elements here of the animals wearing human clothes and these very mannered, sinuous trees as well. 79 00:08:39,320 --> 00:08:47,600 And that's contrasted with more aethereal elfin-like figures, I guess, like this one, 80 00:08:47,600 --> 00:08:53,900 for example, which is really quite beautiful, but also has kind of goblin characters in the front. 81 00:08:53,900 --> 00:09:03,180 And you can see from his technique that he's using line drawing, which he was a master of, with a watercolour wash, and he uses quite muted tones. 82 00:09:03,180 --> 00:09:13,540 So a typical Rackhamesque picture would just use dusky mauves, pale blues, russet browns, quite earthy twilight colours. 83 00:09:13,540 --> 00:09:18,290 So that's very typical sort of Rackham illustration. 84 00:09:18,290 --> 00:09:24,050 But I think it would do a disservice to him to just focus on those elements. There's 85 00:09:24,050 --> 00:09:29,670 other variations as well, like these very economical pen and ink line drawings here. 86 00:09:29,670 --> 00:09:39,400 Very few strokes, but very expressive. And paging through. 87 00:09:39,400 --> 00:09:48,970 Then you've got these very atmospheric, almost Nordic forest scenes. Rackham's well known for his trees, and we can look at a few more in a minute. 88 00:09:48,970 --> 00:09:53,350 And the other thing is that Rackham also was a master of silhouette drawing. 89 00:09:53,350 --> 00:10:02,860 And you can see that here. And some of his works, in fact, like his copy of Cinderella, is entirely in silhouette with very occasional colour as well. 90 00:10:02,860 --> 00:10:07,580 So it's quite varied. It's quite interesting. 91 00:10:07,580 --> 00:10:15,670 And here's a brilliant example of one of his trees, his anthropomorphic trees, which is a bit of a Rackham hallmark there with the face. 92 00:10:15,670 --> 00:10:21,910 And I know we've come across some in other texts. I don't know whether you wanted to have a look at those ones as well. 93 00:10:21,910 --> 00:10:29,890 Yes. If we can take a look at our English Fairy Tales animate tree, that would be a delight. 94 00:10:29,890 --> 00:10:38,140 So it seems what seems to me so striking about Rackham's illustrations is that they are so masterfully done with texture. 95 00:10:38,140 --> 00:10:41,320 Everything has such detail. It looks like you can really feel it. 96 00:10:41,320 --> 00:10:46,600 And when we have these sort of gnarled trees and goblin features, that's one sort of particular kind of texture. 97 00:10:46,600 --> 00:10:53,680 When we look at these aethereal fairy features where he's where he's sort of 98 00:10:53,680 --> 00:10:59,800 blurred the watercolour wash, and the figures kind of fade into the background. 99 00:10:59,800 --> 00:11:04,720 That's an entirely different texture. Yeah. 100 00:11:04,720 --> 00:11:08,470 And I think his use of colour is really interesting as well. 101 00:11:08,470 --> 00:11:17,620 I think because he he really understood the possibilities of the photographic reproduction process and he was 102 00:11:17,620 --> 00:11:24,790 at pains to make sure that the images represented truly the colours that he was using as much as possible. 103 00:11:24,790 --> 00:11:27,460 And I think looking at the colours he uses as well, 104 00:11:27,460 --> 00:11:35,380 I wonder whether he deliberately limited his colour palette and used these sorts of desaturated tones 105 00:11:35,380 --> 00:11:41,500 precisely because he knew what could be achieved and what couldn't be achieved with technology at that time. 106 00:11:41,500 --> 00:11:53,550 That's a very particular sensibility, not only to creating an atmosphere in the art, but also sort of to the mechanism of reproducing it. 107 00:11:53,550 --> 00:12:04,570 Yeah, exactly, so it's really good understanding of the book as an object and and the publication process, I think he was quite commercially savvy. 108 00:12:04,570 --> 00:12:12,790 Yeah, and this is a brilliant illustration of the talking tree, because the tree is meant to be sort of animate in the story, right? You know, the little girl, 109 00:12:12,790 --> 00:12:20,590 It's a classic good sister, bad sister story where the good sister escapes from a witch with various treasures and the bad 110 00:12:20,590 --> 00:12:27,790 sister gets eaten or put in an oven or whatever because she's too selfish to ask for help. 111 00:12:27,790 --> 00:12:36,310 But so our good sister is up in the tree blending into the blossoms and the tree is bending over the witch to say, 112 00:12:36,310 --> 00:12:44,860 I haven't seen her, not for seven year. And there's something very expressive about that face sort of bent over the witch, isn't there? 113 00:12:44,860 --> 00:12:50,260 Yeah. I mean, it's as I say, it's a Rackham hallmark, the expressive faces. 114 00:12:50,260 --> 00:12:58,390 And there's something we were talking earlier, there's something quite Entish about them. Tolkien readers, particularly there's an illustration 115 00:12:58,390 --> 00:13:05,830 later on in Comus with a walking tree, which it does make you wonder whether Tolkien was influenced by that. 116 00:13:05,830 --> 00:13:09,920 I think we have to imagine so on some level. 117 00:13:09,920 --> 00:13:22,510 So speaking of inspiration, then, what artists inspired Rackham and who was sort of inspired by him? 118 00:13:22,510 --> 00:13:27,820 What's his place in the kind of history of the way that we interpret these stories? 119 00:13:27,820 --> 00:13:35,020 Well, I can tell you who Rackham cited as his influences. He named William Blake, Charles Keen, 120 00:13:35,020 --> 00:13:39,190 He was a contemporary illustrator. He's been described as a bit of an artist's artist. 121 00:13:39,190 --> 00:13:44,140 He's more obscure than Arthur Rackham, but very highly regarded. 122 00:13:44,140 --> 00:13:50,350 And Rackham was also an admirer of the German renaissance engraver Albrecht Durer, which I think you really see. 123 00:13:50,350 --> 00:13:53,650 You were talking only about the detail and the texture and the pattern. And I think that's really there 124 00:13:53,650 --> 00:13:59,680 in Durer's engravings, and particularly in the monochromatic works that Rackham has 125 00:13:59,680 --> 00:14:02,860 in some of this texts, a lot of that detail is captured. 126 00:14:02,860 --> 00:14:11,890 The other influence which I think is fairly apparent in reckons work is that of other slightly earlier book illustrators. 127 00:14:11,890 --> 00:14:18,460 So we talked about John Tenniel, who illustrated Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but also George Crookshank. 128 00:14:18,460 --> 00:14:23,680 He was also a master of detail and had a caricature style. 129 00:14:23,680 --> 00:14:32,980 And he also did these sort of scrap work sketches for publications and periodicals that were around in the late Victorian period. 130 00:14:32,980 --> 00:14:36,980 And he also illustrated German popular stories and fairy tales as well. 131 00:14:36,980 --> 00:14:44,530 So I'm sure that had a bearing on Rackham's work and his interests. In terms of who he influenced, 132 00:14:44,530 --> 00:14:54,370 I think it would be difficult to identify fantasy artists and children's illustrators who weren't directly or indirectly 133 00:14:54,370 --> 00:15:00,280 influenced by Rackham's work because he was so prolific and he was so popular and influential in that Golden Age 134 00:15:00,280 --> 00:15:02,500 of Illustration which spanned, you know, 135 00:15:02,500 --> 00:15:13,960 a couple of generations really. Those kind of grotesque and inky elements, which are kind of redolent of Mervin Peake, and there's a lot of humour as well, 136 00:15:13,960 --> 00:15:21,760 which I think you see in some later fantasy illustrators, and particularly illustrators of the humorous writers, like Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. 137 00:15:21,760 --> 00:15:28,840 I'm thinking of things like that, and perhaps also a bit of Walt Disney as well in his early films. 138 00:15:28,840 --> 00:15:33,370 You do see it, don't you? Yeah, perhaps a little bit less detail. 139 00:15:33,370 --> 00:15:40,810 But the muted colours of something like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and the very expressive faces, I think owes something to Arthur Rackham. 140 00:15:40,810 --> 00:15:51,010 And yeah, I think very much so. I think you can also sort of very specifically see the simultaneous influence of Durer and Blake at the same time. 141 00:15:51,010 --> 00:16:01,270 Right. This sort of engraver's precision and the fantasist's kind of watercolour wash with these fantastic landscapes. 142 00:16:01,270 --> 00:16:10,830 That's very cool. I also do wonder if we see in some of his sort of hand-drawn illustrations, if we see a little bit of Quentin Blake. 143 00:16:10,830 --> 00:16:14,800 Yes. Yes. You could well be right there. Just a little bit. 144 00:16:14,800 --> 00:16:21,430 They're very, very expressive and they're very economical, kind of graphic, very few pen strokes. 145 00:16:21,430 --> 00:16:26,260 And later on, I'd like to show you some of the hand drawn sketches. 146 00:16:26,260 --> 00:16:33,370 They're inside some extra special Rackham editions. I think maybe you can see elements of Quentin Blake there as well. 147 00:16:33,370 --> 00:16:39,220 Let's see what you think. Absolutely. So now the sort of obvious question, 148 00:16:39,220 --> 00:16:48,500 why does an academic institution like Trinity College have this collection of beautifully illustrated children's books? 149 00:16:48,500 --> 00:16:56,860 It's slightly incongruous, isn't it? And I think that, well, the reason is that they were part of a larger bequest from the Danson family. 150 00:16:56,860 --> 00:17:04,220 So I mentioned we're standing here in our Danson Library. And this is largely filled with books from Lieutenant 151 00:17:04,220 --> 00:17:10,950 Colonel John Raymond Danson, he donated the collection in nineteen seventy six, and his parents and his grandparents as well, 152 00:17:10,950 --> 00:17:17,120 who were marine insurers but also avid book collectors, they put their money to good use. 153 00:17:17,120 --> 00:17:21,800 And it kind of begs the question why the Danson family collected them. 154 00:17:21,800 --> 00:17:24,560 And I think they collected them for two reasons. 155 00:17:24,560 --> 00:17:31,280 One of which was that they were very interested in illustrative works of all kinds across all periods and places, 156 00:17:31,280 --> 00:17:36,200 you know, spanning from heraldic works to herbals. 157 00:17:36,200 --> 00:17:39,410 And in terms of Rackham's contemporaries or his new contemporaries, 158 00:17:39,410 --> 00:17:47,580 we do have books here that were illustrated not just by Arthur Rackham, but by the likes of Aubrey Beardsley, Edmund Dulac and E. H. Shepherd, 159 00:17:47,580 --> 00:17:50,720 who illustrated the Winnie the Pooh books as well. 160 00:17:50,720 --> 00:17:57,740 And what's exciting for us here at Trinity is that we've really only scratched the surface of what we have here in the Danson Library. 161 00:17:57,740 --> 00:18:05,030 We know about the Rackham books because they've been catalogued to antiquarian standards and that's been generously supported by donors. 162 00:18:05,030 --> 00:18:10,340 But much still remains to be discovered. So there's the illustrated side of things. 163 00:18:10,340 --> 00:18:14,030 And the other thing, I guess, is that they're collectable by design. 164 00:18:14,030 --> 00:18:20,660 As I was saying when we looked at the Ingoldsby legends and looking at the deluxe edition, 165 00:18:20,660 --> 00:18:28,340 they have high production values, but they're also incredibly popular. The books are mass-produced in trade editions by big commercial publishers, 166 00:18:28,340 --> 00:18:33,710 some of whom we're still familiar with today, like Macmillan, like Heinneman, Hodder and Stoughton. 167 00:18:33,710 --> 00:18:38,820 And then on top of that, there were variant editions which were then published for the American and European markets. 168 00:18:38,820 --> 00:18:48,010 As a collector, variation is good. And I can show you one of our trade editions, which is 169 00:18:48,010 --> 00:18:57,970 our King Arthur stories, which are edited by Pollard and based on Thomas Malory's novel, Morte D'Arthur. 170 00:18:57,970 --> 00:19:03,040 So this just gives you a sense of what a lot of the trade editions look like, 171 00:19:03,040 --> 00:19:09,790 which is still staggeringly beautiful, they have these amazing gold inlaid illustrations, 172 00:19:09,790 --> 00:19:14,920 which you can see here, but the binding is just a bit more workaday. It's a buchkram binding. 173 00:19:14,920 --> 00:19:22,240 It's less luxurious altogether. The paper is well, this is in pristine condition. 174 00:19:22,240 --> 00:19:26,710 This is a first edition, but it's altogether thinner. 175 00:19:26,710 --> 00:19:35,980 There are illustrations and there are colour illustrations as well. But it's just a more economical way of printing. 176 00:19:35,980 --> 00:19:42,020 And there's just a little bit less of the opulence of the deluxe editions about it. 177 00:19:42,020 --> 00:19:44,200 You can see an illustration of that. 178 00:19:44,200 --> 00:19:53,710 So that's the trade editions of which there were many, many copies which were very profitable and very popular, and these were beautiful enough. 179 00:19:53,710 --> 00:19:59,080 But there was also this pioneering commercial decision to publish small runs of the deluxe editions, 180 00:19:59,080 --> 00:20:07,210 which was for the gift book market, which I mentioned earlier. And these emulate the aesthetics and the feel of the Arts and Crafts Movement, private press books, 181 00:20:07,210 --> 00:20:11,320 really. They don't look like machine made books at all. 182 00:20:11,320 --> 00:20:18,700 And in fact, I think it's a contemporary critic at the Times who said that they were more suited to the drawing room than to the nursery. 183 00:20:18,700 --> 00:20:26,410 I think as a bit of a criticism about the standard of production for things like the Ingoldsby Legends, 184 00:20:26,410 --> 00:20:31,700 which I can just briefly show you again, because perhaps they weren't suitable for children. 185 00:20:31,700 --> 00:20:39,230 But I mean, as we all know, children's books aren't just for children. And I think the Danson family certainly felt that way. 186 00:20:39,230 --> 00:20:47,360 Then later in Rackham's career, we have the addition of extra limited copies, and these are sometimes called Rackham Specials, 187 00:20:47,360 --> 00:20:54,530 and these feature the work of prestigious bookbinders and they have unique hand-drawn sketches which are signed by Rackham. 188 00:20:54,530 --> 00:20:59,840 And this only enhances their appeal to collectors and to children as well. 189 00:20:59,840 --> 00:21:10,910 So I can show you an example of one of the Rackham specials, and this is a copy of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market. 190 00:21:10,910 --> 00:21:17,660 And I just read it. As you can see, this has a full leather binding. 191 00:21:17,660 --> 00:21:29,060 It's green Morocco, it's got the gold border and it's a fairly slim, attractive, almost nondescript book from the outside. 192 00:21:29,060 --> 00:21:35,780 But you've got this marvellous explosion of colour with the end papers, the marbled end papers. 193 00:21:35,780 --> 00:21:42,830 And just at the bottom of the turn-ins, it's got a description saying bound by Sangorski and Sutcliffe, 194 00:21:42,830 --> 00:21:55,370 you have really prestigious binders, and then if we page through this, the paper is just altogether thicker, very creamy, high quality, high density paper. 195 00:21:55,370 --> 00:22:05,330 And then you've got these marvellous end papers, these pictorial, semi-abstract end papers with goblins. 196 00:22:05,330 --> 00:22:07,680 And this is also designed by Rackham. 197 00:22:07,680 --> 00:22:18,420 So the attention to detail in the artwork that's gone into even things like the end papers before the text starts, this is really quite something. 198 00:22:18,420 --> 00:22:26,940 And here we have one of the hand drawn sketches which are entirely unique to each copy, so the limited edition statement, 199 00:22:26,940 --> 00:22:33,930 here, says this edition is limited to four hundred and ten copies of which 400 copies are for sale. 200 00:22:33,930 --> 00:22:36,930 So these 10 copies weren't initially for sale. 201 00:22:36,930 --> 00:22:45,240 In fact, most of these extra special, extra limited editions were presentation copies for Arthur Rackham to give to family and friends. 202 00:22:45,240 --> 00:22:50,070 So his daughter had some of them, for instance, and this is copy number two. 203 00:22:50,070 --> 00:22:57,030 You can see a rather charming goblin at the Goblin Market. Why wouldn't you want to taste his fruits? 204 00:22:57,030 --> 00:22:59,460 So that's signed by the illustrator. 205 00:22:59,460 --> 00:23:08,400 And again, we've got one of the anthropomorphic trees there as well, and perhaps a touch of Quentin Blake playfulness about it. 206 00:23:08,400 --> 00:23:11,700 Yes, this is what I was thinking of when I when I said Blake, 207 00:23:11,700 --> 00:23:20,280 it's the sort of energy of the line drawing and the sharpness of it, especially in the faces. 208 00:23:20,280 --> 00:23:25,780 But they do they do look friendly, don't they? These goblins at their market, their fruits do look nice. 209 00:23:25,780 --> 00:23:30,660 And such a charming illustration for a children's book, 210 00:23:30,660 --> 00:23:41,760 but also obviously fantastic for collectors as well to have a hold of something that is so unique in books which were so ubiquitous, 211 00:23:41,760 --> 00:23:47,100 really, that were so widely available. That's something that no one else would have. 212 00:23:47,100 --> 00:23:51,360 So, yeah, so they were collectable and they were illustrated. 213 00:23:51,360 --> 00:23:55,140 And that's why the Danson family, I think, collected them. 214 00:23:55,140 --> 00:24:03,670 And I'll just show you quickly the Danson Library book plate, the John Raymond Danson personal book plate, which is a work of art in and of itself. 215 00:24:03,670 --> 00:24:08,070 I don't know whether you can see in any detail here. Just to describe it to you. 216 00:24:08,070 --> 00:24:11,120 As I said, they were maritime insurance average adjusters. 217 00:24:11,120 --> 00:24:21,660 So we've got a merman, possibly Poseidon himself, with his trident, looking back over at the shore while there's a beached fishing boat out to sea. 218 00:24:21,660 --> 00:24:25,650 So that's rather extraordinary. And that actually designed by Stephen Gooden. 219 00:24:25,650 --> 00:24:31,920 And he was another illustrator who was working in the nineteen thirties, a contemporary of Arthur Rackham's as well. 220 00:24:31,920 --> 00:24:36,570 We should all be so lucky to have such end papers in our books. 221 00:24:36,570 --> 00:24:46,110 Yeah. I think maybe the word iconic is overused, but this is perhaps an iconic book plate and rather lovely. 222 00:24:46,110 --> 00:24:51,060 So what on the whole would you say is special about the Trinity collection? 223 00:24:51,060 --> 00:24:57,670 So there are a couple of things which make Trinity's collection particularly exciting to me as the librarian here and also, 224 00:24:57,670 --> 00:25:05,250 I hope, particularly interesting to researchers. So as I mentioned earlier, there are many, many variant editions of Rackham's books. 225 00:25:05,250 --> 00:25:08,760 So our collection here, we have around 40 or so. 226 00:25:08,760 --> 00:25:15,780 It's by no means comprehensive. But I do think it's representative of Rackham's work as a children's book illustrator. 227 00:25:15,780 --> 00:25:22,800 We had some early work like Rip Van Winkle, which was from 1905, right through to the Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham. 228 00:25:22,800 --> 00:25:30,780 And we have a posthumous edition of that published in 1951. So I think it's a great place to start if you want to do comparative work to explore 229 00:25:30,780 --> 00:25:35,490 book illustrations across a number of different literary genres and subgenres. 230 00:25:35,490 --> 00:25:38,860 And of course, if you're a fan of Rackham's work. 231 00:25:38,860 --> 00:25:46,660 The other thing is that the collection is rich in deluxe editions, as we've seen, and on top of that, we have this clutch of Rackham specials. 232 00:25:46,660 --> 00:25:53,950 So it's really possible to appreciate the books as material objects here and get a real sense of the difference between the trade editions, 233 00:25:53,950 --> 00:26:01,550 the deluxe editions and the Rackham specials, as we've seen. And in fact, we're even lucky enough to have two Rackham specials of the same text. 234 00:26:01,550 --> 00:26:05,740 So Christine Rossetti's Goblin Market with this unique illustration... 235 00:26:05,740 --> 00:26:10,510 Allow me to introduce you to Christina Rossetti's 236 00:26:10,510 --> 00:26:19,870 Goblin Market, and I will skip ahead to the limited edition statement and the hand-drawn sketch, 237 00:26:19,870 --> 00:26:24,280 which I hope you can see here, which again, it's playful, 238 00:26:24,280 --> 00:26:32,350 it's expressive, it's colourful, but altogether more menacing than the other hand- 239 00:26:32,350 --> 00:26:40,300 drawn illustration that we've got, of the more benign goblin. Yeah, very different attitudes. 240 00:26:40,300 --> 00:26:44,710 But that's such a versatile style. Yeah, very much so. 241 00:26:44,710 --> 00:26:51,970 And I mean, it's only because in places like institutions like Trinity Library here, and there are 242 00:26:51,970 --> 00:26:57,730 other libraries in the US that hold bigger collections, you can actually make those comparisons because, 243 00:26:57,730 --> 00:27:02,740 of course, in private hands, especially when they were initially given away as presentation copies, 244 00:27:02,740 --> 00:27:06,820 nobody would get to see more than one illustration for the same work. 245 00:27:06,820 --> 00:27:10,540 So that's quite a privilege. That's quite exciting. 246 00:27:10,540 --> 00:27:15,970 Is it possible to compare one of the illustrations inside The Goblin Market with the hand drawn one, 247 00:27:15,970 --> 00:27:20,950 to see the differences in his various styles? Yeah, on page three, 248 00:27:20,950 --> 00:27:25,180 I mean, so this is quite a quite a different style, this one here. 249 00:27:25,180 --> 00:27:29,720 It's lovely. Very pre-Raphaelite, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, very pre-Raphaelite. 250 00:27:29,720 --> 00:27:34,690 Like there are elements that particularly I think in the fairytales and we were looking 251 00:27:34,690 --> 00:27:38,410 earlier at Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods and there are certainly some very, 252 00:27:38,410 --> 00:27:46,800 very pre-Raphaelite Rhine Maidens in there. Quite. Which we'll hopefully have a look at momentarily. 253 00:27:46,800 --> 00:28:04,240 And you have these very beautiful, very neat, brief line drawings that punctuate the text. 254 00:28:04,240 --> 00:28:09,960 Another colour one coming up. These are all lovely, aren't they? 255 00:28:09,960 --> 00:28:22,030 They're charming, charming without being sentimental, necessarily. It's that edge of inky darkness that saves them from being too saccharine. 256 00:28:22,030 --> 00:28:29,200 I couldn't put it better myself. So do you have a favourite item in the collection? 257 00:28:29,200 --> 00:28:36,430 A favourite book, a favourite illustration? Well, that's a dangerous question to ask a librarian, because we don't usually have favourites, 258 00:28:36,430 --> 00:28:40,630 or at least it doesn't stay the same and we don't always have just one. 259 00:28:40,630 --> 00:28:44,500 I have two favourites, actually, if I can show you. 260 00:28:44,500 --> 00:28:52,930 So one of these, and I think this is a text that you will be interested in, is Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination. 261 00:28:52,930 --> 00:29:00,100 And this was quite a late work for Arthur Rackham, it was published in 1935 and he died in 1939. 262 00:29:00,100 --> 00:29:06,310 And another one of our Rackham specials, the super extra limited editions here. 263 00:29:06,310 --> 00:29:09,730 And this one is also bound by some Sangorski and Sutcliffe. 264 00:29:09,730 --> 00:29:18,110 And the tools, the pictorial tools here are also designed by Arthur Rackham, the owl and the bat on the diagonals there, 265 00:29:18,110 --> 00:29:27,880 which is quite a quite beautiful. And I guess the reason I like this one so much is the sheer variety of illustrations. 266 00:29:27,880 --> 00:29:34,420 It's a real feast for the eyes. So prepare yourself. We're looking now at a lovely, blank, creamy paper. 267 00:29:34,420 --> 00:29:41,950 If you turn over, it's a riot. I mean, it's monochromatic, but it is so dazzling. 268 00:29:41,950 --> 00:29:51,250 It's so angular and and the skeletons are so expressive and menacing and perhaps a bit scared. 269 00:29:51,250 --> 00:29:54,550 There's something electrifying about it. 270 00:29:54,550 --> 00:29:59,050 Really. Absolutely. And that looks like a woodcut, but it is ink drawing. 271 00:29:59,050 --> 00:30:08,020 Yeah. This is a pen and ink drawing. But yes, it's very much kind of mimics that, that monochromatic colouring that you see in woodcuts. 272 00:30:08,020 --> 00:30:12,250 And here is another one of Rackham's hand drawn sketches. 273 00:30:12,250 --> 00:30:23,590 And I just love the self-referential element of this and the playfulness of the gremlin scaring the person who's reading and has dropped Poe's tales. 274 00:30:23,590 --> 00:30:28,900 And so perhaps a cautionary message to the reader, not too read it too close to bed time. 275 00:30:28,900 --> 00:30:33,790 And this one, again, is limited. Four hundred and sixty copies were available. 276 00:30:33,790 --> 00:30:40,000 Ten were not for sale. And this is number two again and again, signed by Arthur Rackham. 277 00:30:40,000 --> 00:30:47,680 But it's just glorious. And then if we continue on through the text, you're talking about details. 278 00:30:47,680 --> 00:30:52,330 So much detail. I mean, isn't that great for the body? 279 00:30:52,330 --> 00:30:58,390 And with that horrifying expression on its face. It's a dramatic, isn't it? 280 00:30:58,390 --> 00:31:07,600 And the use of shadow and the etching on it here, the lines, it's so, so violent and vivid. 281 00:31:07,600 --> 00:31:08,620 And at the same time, 282 00:31:08,620 --> 00:31:19,490 there's so much attention to mundane details like the walls and the lines on the wooden floor boards and the rattling chair. 283 00:31:19,490 --> 00:31:30,370 More great creatures. Yes, exactly. And this one looks very different again. 284 00:31:30,370 --> 00:31:34,180 Yeah, it reminds me of illustrators like Crookshank, 285 00:31:34,180 --> 00:31:41,140 who were actually getting their work etched rather than the photographic process in black and white. 286 00:31:41,140 --> 00:31:49,840 Lots of linework here as well. And the expressions, it's extraordinary and it's good fun. 287 00:31:49,840 --> 00:31:53,500 It's just, it's very playful but also terrifying. 288 00:31:53,500 --> 00:32:05,920 And I think that is one of the pleasures of looking at a Rackham illustrated text, is that frisson of excitement and fear 289 00:32:05,920 --> 00:32:16,030 at the same time. You look at the maelstrom there. Quite. Poe would approve of that sort of excitement and terror combined. 290 00:32:16,030 --> 00:32:23,230 Exactly, exactly. These kinds of mediaeval elements. 291 00:32:23,230 --> 00:32:32,770 And the colour illustrations, again, but usually for Rackham, certainly for his later work, is very monochromatic. 292 00:32:32,770 --> 00:32:42,450 I think that adds to the drama. Here's here's Hop-frog, one of the more terrifying characters in the Poe canon. 293 00:32:42,450 --> 00:32:47,490 They're just extraordinary, and the movement in them. 294 00:32:47,490 --> 00:32:58,200 They really tell a story. And I think Rackham understood his text so well that he was never slavish in his interpretations of them. 295 00:32:58,200 --> 00:33:04,400 He was never confined to very literal interpretations. The use of shadow there and silhouette 296 00:33:04,400 --> 00:33:10,230 is something that Rackham returns to here. 297 00:33:10,230 --> 00:33:15,130 Yeah. I mean, as good a representation of The Pit and the Pendulum as any I've ever seen. 298 00:33:15,130 --> 00:33:18,810 Exactly. So, I mean, we could go on. So that's one of them. 299 00:33:18,810 --> 00:33:27,120 But I will switch back to John Milton's Comus and this one, I just find such an interesting choice. 300 00:33:27,120 --> 00:33:32,430 I mean, he has illustrated Shakespeare, but this is a courtly masque, 301 00:33:32,430 --> 00:33:40,710 a mid 17th century dramatic performance intended for a very small coterie of viewers. 302 00:33:40,710 --> 00:33:52,930 It's about chastity, slightly unusual, and quite different thematically to many of the texts. But I love the variety in here. 303 00:33:52,930 --> 00:34:02,850 And I also just wanted to show you this illustration in particular because it really epitomises Arthur Rackham's playfulness and inventiveness. 304 00:34:02,850 --> 00:34:07,920 So if you look at the the protective guard sheet in front of the illustration, 305 00:34:07,920 --> 00:34:13,320 which have these very handy captions, it says: 'and so they, so perfect in their misery, 306 00:34:13,320 --> 00:34:18,630 not once perceive their foul disfigurement, but boast themselves more comely than before.' 307 00:34:18,630 --> 00:34:25,410 So they've drunk a malign magic potion, which turns them all into beasts. 308 00:34:25,410 --> 00:34:31,100 And we look at the illustration is just – oh, wow – it's just so witty. 309 00:34:31,100 --> 00:34:41,310 There's a wonderful juxtaposition between these fantastical hybrid human animals and some of them are 310 00:34:41,310 --> 00:34:48,180 more suggestive than literal, the woman in the foreground has these very snake like eyes. 311 00:34:48,180 --> 00:34:52,770 But then you have just a goat's head and it's comical. 312 00:34:52,770 --> 00:34:57,030 I mean, they're looking at themselves in the mirror and they can't recognise their own disfigurement. 313 00:34:57,030 --> 00:35:04,020 But it's also inventive because it's that mix of the fantastical and the realistic and the detailed. 314 00:35:04,020 --> 00:35:11,970 It's an illustration of the fiction of people morphing into animals. 315 00:35:11,970 --> 00:35:22,990 But it's also a play on the kind of. Dutch Golden Age painters with very realistic still lives, and you've got there the wildfowl, 316 00:35:22,990 --> 00:35:26,770 theee the sort of hunting trophies and that's not in the text at all. 317 00:35:26,770 --> 00:35:32,830 And it becomes quite layered and sort of animals hunting animals. 318 00:35:32,830 --> 00:35:36,880 And it doesn't have to be there. But it is. 319 00:35:36,880 --> 00:35:41,860 And I think that really does speak to Arthur Rackham's ethos. 320 00:35:41,860 --> 00:35:48,280 And he explained this to other illustrators and said the role of the illustrator is not to 321 00:35:48,280 --> 00:35:55,690 make up for any shortcomings in the text of the author or to clarify anything that isn't clear. 322 00:35:55,690 --> 00:36:01,420 It's there to add to it. And this is an example of Arthur Rackham taking an idea and running with it. 323 00:36:01,420 --> 00:36:12,880 So I really wanted to share that with you. Yeah, and adding the sort of bloody aspect that the text kind of implies, dances around, 324 00:36:12,880 --> 00:36:18,600 gestures toward the danger, and he literalizes it in the image. 325 00:36:18,600 --> 00:36:26,880 That's fantastic. Now, do you have a favourite I know you've looked at a few of them, would you like to go to page through one? 326 00:36:26,880 --> 00:36:35,550 Absolutely. So I grew up with an illustrated Arthur Rackham fairy tales book, and the images have really stayed with me. 327 00:36:35,550 --> 00:36:47,280 But one of the books with a style that just is fascinating for historians of fantasy is his interpretation of Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. 328 00:36:47,280 --> 00:36:53,520 So we can maybe take a look at that, because this is an illustrated version of Wagner's text. 329 00:36:53,520 --> 00:37:02,460 And the text was hugely inspirational to a lot of the sort of great Oxford fantasy authors. 330 00:37:02,460 --> 00:37:10,440 C.S. Lewis famously said that this is the sort of thing that gave him a whiff of pure northernness, whatever that means. 331 00:37:10,440 --> 00:37:14,790 But Tolkien was very interested also in Wagner's use of myth. 332 00:37:14,790 --> 00:37:18,030 It informed the way that he 333 00:37:18,030 --> 00:37:27,990 shaped Middle Earth. And obviously there are sort of attendant complications to looking at a Wagner text in this day and age 334 00:37:27,990 --> 00:37:37,050 and looking at the way that Rackham interprets these characters as sort of terribly blonde and Nordic. 335 00:37:37,050 --> 00:37:43,770 But he's looking to sort of create an atmosphere that also really spills 336 00:37:43,770 --> 00:37:52,440 over into his fairy tale illustrations that I think is worth considering. 337 00:37:52,440 --> 00:37:59,160 And so I think if we sort of take a look at this first illustration. 338 00:37:59,160 --> 00:38:08,730 This is this is our Smith, Mime in the in the German, who is going to be raising our hero, 339 00:38:08,730 --> 00:38:12,660 Siegfried, and encouraging him to slay a dragon very shortly. 340 00:38:12,660 --> 00:38:21,000 But you can see here the same sort of stuff that we get in Rackham's fairy tale illustrations, a real sense of texture, 341 00:38:21,000 --> 00:38:35,100 of light and dark and the sort of glowing blade with that muted red brush sort of draws the eye immediately. 342 00:38:35,100 --> 00:38:42,450 He's going for atmosphere and he's going for this sort of pseudo mediaeval atmosphere. 343 00:38:42,450 --> 00:38:50,800 He's trying to sort of imagine this this idealised past in an interesting way, because it's also - 344 00:38:50,800 --> 00:39:01,780 It's not very clean, is it? It's a bit grim in there, pun intended, and he doesn't shy away from that either. 345 00:39:01,780 --> 00:39:05,800 I wonder if potentially also we could take a look at the Rhine maidens, 346 00:39:05,800 --> 00:39:21,440 which is a hugely famous illustration that gets a lot of attention, if I can find it correctly. 347 00:39:21,440 --> 00:39:26,050 This is also a great one here we have. 348 00:39:26,050 --> 00:39:41,980 Two of our dwarf smiths over the body of the dead dragon who is here interpreted as very snakelike, especially in the in the head area here, 349 00:39:41,980 --> 00:39:56,380 which is perhaps more in line with the Norse version of the text where our word for dragon has a huge semantic range. 350 00:39:56,380 --> 00:40:02,920 But if we sort of skip forward to see Siegfried 351 00:40:02,920 --> 00:40:13,380 speaking to the Rhine maidens. Here he is first with Brunhilde. 352 00:40:13,380 --> 00:40:28,750 As we can see, they're very blonde, perhaps, perhaps too blonde, you know, there is an aspect to this kind of mythmaking that is, 353 00:40:28,750 --> 00:40:35,710 that projects back into the past a sort of idealisation that can be used in very negative ways, 354 00:40:35,710 --> 00:40:43,390 and so we want to be conscious and careful of approaching these texts and these illustrations 355 00:40:43,390 --> 00:40:49,060 and sort of considering, what are the implicit values being projected in a picture like that? 356 00:40:49,060 --> 00:40:59,800 What does it mean? Why illustrate them that way? Sort of confronting it critically in so far as we can. 357 00:40:59,800 --> 00:41:12,250 If we continue paging through, can see he's got the whole text printed out. 358 00:41:12,250 --> 00:41:23,590 Here's another Brunhilde kissing the cursed ring from the from the hoard of gold that Siegfried recovered from Fafner, the dead dragon. 359 00:41:23,590 --> 00:41:29,860 The ring is going to be trouble. Spoiler alert for Wagner's Ring Cycle. 360 00:41:29,860 --> 00:41:44,250 But again, the level of detail is incredible and especially in the attention paid to the tree, I think as well is sounding very Rackhamesque. 361 00:41:44,250 --> 00:41:52,350 If we sort of zip through the rest of our Nordic landscapes. 362 00:41:52,350 --> 00:42:00,240 Here we have a Rhine maiden confronting Brunhilde about the ring, and there's a real, 363 00:42:00,240 --> 00:42:09,900 again, sense of motion and dynamism in this one, it's very dramatic. 364 00:42:09,900 --> 00:42:29,260 He's looking sort of very intentionally at the kind of movement forward in a way, which I think is is lovely purely from an artistic standpoint. 365 00:42:29,260 --> 00:42:35,190 If we go a little bit further, 366 00:42:35,190 --> 00:42:44,100 You should be at the Rhine maidens soon. Something which struck me looking at this text, 367 00:42:44,100 --> 00:42:54,540 I think we often associate Wagner with quite an investment in time, like these epic stories, and something that you get from a Rackham 368 00:42:54,540 --> 00:43:02,380 book is almost an abridged version by flicking through to these pages with the tipped-in photographs in the paper, 369 00:43:02,380 --> 00:43:09,810 with the captions in front of them. You can almost see the key milestones, if you like, in the story. 370 00:43:09,810 --> 00:43:20,040 And he's giving you a plot summary in a way. You could you could look through these and and sort of get the kind of highlights of the narrative. 371 00:43:20,040 --> 00:43:24,270 So here is Siegfried with the Rhine maidens. They are encouraging. 372 00:43:24,270 --> 00:43:30,270 They look very sort of siren-like. In the Ring Cycle 373 00:43:30,270 --> 00:43:38,790 They are deeply invested in the return of the cursed gold to the to the river, to their own possession. 374 00:43:38,790 --> 00:43:43,710 But it looks here a little bit like they're trying to get Siegfried himself to enter the river. 375 00:43:43,710 --> 00:43:47,520 They're intentionally sort of done in this seductive way. 376 00:43:47,520 --> 00:43:51,480 And you were saying earlier that, you made a comparison to Aubrey Beardsley. 377 00:43:51,480 --> 00:43:57,210 And I think we can safely say that a lot of illustrators of this period love the femme fatale. 378 00:43:57,210 --> 00:44:07,080 The Pre-Raphaelites also love the femme fatale. Very interested in this idea of the woman whose beauty is dangerous. 379 00:44:07,080 --> 00:44:11,850 Right. That conceals poison. La Belle Dame Sans Merci. 380 00:44:11,850 --> 00:44:19,740 Precisely. And I think this is just a very sort of overt realisation of that trope. 381 00:44:19,740 --> 00:44:23,820 And again, with the muted colours and the sort of carefully done textures, 382 00:44:23,820 --> 00:44:28,920 the contrast between the sort of lazy lines of the water and the very precise lines 383 00:44:28,920 --> 00:44:39,590 of Siegfried's sort of invented pseudo mediaeval armour is very striking visually. 384 00:44:39,590 --> 00:44:47,070 And I'm looking at this book, one thing that strikes me is something we've been talking about children's illustrations, 385 00:44:47,070 --> 00:44:54,740 but I wonder if this is a text that's that's more for the adult Danson collectors rather than children. 386 00:44:54,740 --> 00:45:03,170 I might be presupposing what Edwardian children are reading. I sort of hope it wasn't Wagner that they were reading. 387 00:45:03,170 --> 00:45:06,302 I would feel very bad for them if they were reading Wagner. Well that's wonderful. Thank you so much for letting me show you some of the items in our collection and hopefully if any researchers are watching this and are interested in exploring more they can get in touch. Come and pay us a visit. Thank you for having us, this has been such an exciting virtual tour of this collection. And wonderful to know also that it's available for consultation.