Perhaps the Most Beautiful Children's Book Ever Published
[NIELSEN, Kay, Illustrator. [ASBJÖRNSEN, Peter Christen, and Jörgen Ingebreksten Moe]. East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Old Tales from the North. London: Hodder and Stoughton, [1914].
The first trade edition of Kay Nielsen's greatest work.
Large quarto (11 1/4 x 8 5/8 in; 281 x 220 mm). [2], 206 , [1 printer's imprint], [1 blank] pp. Twenty-five mounted color plates with descriptive tissue guards, numerous black and white text illustrations. Publisher's dark blue cloth decoratively stamped and lettered in gilt on front cover and spine. Pictorial endpapers in gold and black. Some foxing to the margins of the text leaves, the plates clean and fresh. Some rubbing to the binding extremities but still a very good copy.
Danish illustrator and designer Kay Nielsen (1886-1957) "was drawn early on to fairy tales and illustrated many volumes for Hodder & Stoughton: In Powder and Crinoline (1913), East of the Sun, West of the Moon (1914), Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (drawings completed in 1912, but first published in 1924), Hansel and Gretel (1925), and Red Magic (Jonathan Cape, 1930), a collections of fairy tales from around the world. Nielsen's designs unite strong linearity with delicate colouringCharacterized by a sense of two-dimensional flatness, Nielsen's objects and people are highly stylized: foxglove blossoms hang in measured asymmetry; princes and princesses stand on improbably long legs; and their garments billow in gravity-defying parabolas. The power of his illustrations lies in his uncanny ability to retrieve a story's emotional effect on its reader and to recreate it visually in two dimensions" (The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales).
Price: $2,750
(To order this item, or for more information, please call 818-222-4103)
