Description
First edition. One of fifty copies (this being copy thirty-one) on japan vellum signed by compiler Merle Johnson. Publisher’s white cloth over gray paper boards with color plate of a pirate. Folio (235 x 310 mm). With thirty-six plates by Howard Pyle (twelve of which are in color) along with head- and tailpieces and text illustrations. Toning to lower flyleaf and a small blemish to edge of upper board, otherwise a pristine copy, remarkably bright and fresh. Housed in a custom quarter black morocco slipcase. Fine. Published posthumously, Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates collects the artist’s most iconic piratical illustrations and prose. As Merle Johnson notes in the foreword, ""Pirates, Buccaneers, Marooners, those cruel but picturesque sea wolves who once infested the Spanish Main, all live in present-day conceptions in great degree as drawn by the pen and pencil of Howard Pyle."" Indeed, it was Pyle who, in large part, invented the modern conception of pirates’ appearance and dress that persists to this day in characters like Jack Sparrow. Pyle’s swashbucklers are here captured in all their brutality and romance. Pyle (1853 - 1911)was one of the most prominent and popular American illustrators of his day. Throughout his thirty-five-year career, Pyle contributed extensively to periodicals and illustrated editions of Woodrow Wilson, Robert Louis Stevenson, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883), and several Arthurian legends including The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903). He also wrote and illustrated the children’s classic Otto of the Silver Hand (1888), one of the first historical novels written for a juvenile audience. His work was admired by William Morris and by Vincent Van Gogh, who wrote in a letter to his brother, ""Do you know an American magazine called Harper's Monthly? There are things in it which strike me dumb with admiration, including sketches of a Quaker town in the olden days by Howard Pyle."" American National Biography. Fine.
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