A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Very pleasing red morocco, covers with gilt border, raised bands, spine gilt in panels with fleurons at center and corners, gilt lettering, marbled endpapers. With numerous black & white illustrations, 32 of them full-page, and 12 COLOR PLATES mounted on heavy stock, all by W. Heath Robinson. ◆Occasional mild foxing, but an excellent copy, clean and bright internally, and in an unworn binding.

This is an attractively bound copy of Shakespeare's most widely-performed comedy, with appropriately whimsical color plates and numerous black & white illustrations by William Heath Robinson. Featuring gorgeous coloring and an overall dream-like appearance, Robinson's plates are quite reminiscent of the work of fellow "Golden Age" illustrators Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham, and they are perfectly suited for a play about love and enchantment. The black & white illustrations, on the other hand, demonstrate Robinson's talent for caricature--a skill that he would continue to perfect throughout his career. Robinson (1872-1944) was born into a family of artists and illustrators, and, according to his autobiography, from an early age he knew that he "did not want to be anything else than an artist." Though he had at first set his mind to becoming a landscape painter, it was in the realm of book illustration and humorous drawings where Robinson found his greatest successes. He is best known for a series of cartoons illustrating absurdly complicated machines for accomplishing relatively easy tasks--in fact, they were so popular that the term "Heath Robinson contraption" became a part of modern parlance. The binding here adds more than a touch of luxury to an already lovely work.