Walt Disney’s Fantasia. With a Foreword by Leopold Stokowski.

DISNEY, Walt; Deems Taylor .

Item Number: 122482

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940.

First edition of the lavishly illustrated companion volume to Disney’s animated musical masterpiece. Quarto, original cloth, pictorial endpapers, illustrated with 16 mounted color plates. Presentation copy, inscribed by Walt Disney on the title page, “To Robert Fraser from Walt Disney B.A. 1941.” Near fine in a very good dust jacket. 

“Motion picture history was made at the Broadway Theatre last night with the spectacular world premiere of Walt Disney’s long-awaited Fantasia… Mr. Disney and his troop of little men, together with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra and a corps of sound engineers, have fashioned with music and colors and animated figures on a screen a creation so thoroughly delightful and exciting in its novelty that one’s senses are captivated by it, one’s imagination is deliciously inspired” (New York Times). “Serious music had never been so attractively portrayed and untold youngsters were drawn to Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky by the snippets they heard in Fantasia” (Lebrecht, 143). Disney said of his animated orchestral masterpiece, “Fantasia is timeless. It may run ten, twenty, thirty years… Fantasia is an idea in itself. I can never build another.”