Sleeping Beauty.

RACKHAM, Arthur; C.S. Evans.

Item Number: 51023

London: William Heinemann, 1920.

Signed limited deluxe edition. Quarto, original half vellum over cream boards, pictorial endpapers, top edge gilt. One of 625 numbered copies signed by the illustrator Arthur Rackham. Printed on English hand-made paper with an additional color plate. Illustrations: 25 full page silhouettes, comprising 9 in color (frontispiece and 4 double plates)–and 16 in black (including 4 double illustrations); one mounted colored plate; silhouette head- and tail-pieces and other silhouettes throughout the text, in black. In very good condition.

"Rackham's fanciful imagination gave his illustrations instant recognition, and his dedication to illustration kept him in the public eye for 30 years" (Hodnett, 233). Like his Cinderella (1919), The Sleeping Beauty relied "almost wholly for [its] effect on silhouette… Rackham [was] a master of the medium, being able to evoke character and humor by profile and gesture alone, and allowing the two-dimensional effect of his pen work to lead the reader through the book and keep the story going" (Hamilton, 118).