J.R.R. Tolkien – The Emerald City Book Review Archive

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This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt, sponsored by The Broke and the Bookish, is “Top ten book covers I’d frame as pieces of art.” I love beautiful book covers, so this was a fun list to create! Here are some of my favorites (in no particular order).

1. I love the work of Elena and Anna Balbusso so much I’m posting more about them this Friday. Here’s their cover for Hild by Nicola Griffith.

2. Niroot Puttapipat’s art for Luka and the Fire of Life is just stunning. You can’t appreciate the detail in this small image, nor does it show how it wraps around onto the back cover. Please try to see a copy in person!

3. Trina Schart Hyman’s fairy tale illustrations are so beautiful. I also especially like the hand lettering she creates for many of her covers; it gives them such a personal touch. Here is her Rapunzel.

4. From another fantastic pair of artists, Leo and Diane Dillon, a lovely cover for Monica Furlong’s Juniper.

5. A somewhat biased selection — this is the cover for a book I designed for the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America, For the Children of the World. The illustration and lettering are by Gudrid Malmsten from Sweden. (Note: I have the original painting and have actually been meaning to frame it as art!)

6. And somewhere I have a poster with J.R.R. Tolkien’s own artwork for The Hobbit, which I used to have framed on my wall.

7. Here are a couple of newer titles with landscape-based paintings that caught my eye. First is The Colour of Milk by Nell Leyshon; I don’t know the cover artist.

8. And The Golden Day by Ursula Dubosarsky (artist also unknown).

A couple of my favorite Folio Society covers:

9. Peter Suart’s binding design for The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies.

10. And Peter Bailey’s for The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

I could keep going, but I’d better stop there. It was interesting to me to find that there are many covers which I find attractive and effective as book covers, but would not want to “frame as art.” That could be another list all its own. Maybe another time!

**Larrington and Purkiss, eds., Magical Tales (2013)**

My one visit to Oxford was long ago as an 18-year-old on a choir tour of England. Our chaperones normally kept a pretty tight rein on us, but for some reason this time they actually let us roam around by ourselves for a while. I was in literary heaven. I visited Blackwell’s bookstore, found “Alice’s Shop” (the model for the sheep’s shop in Through the Looking Glass), and ended up at the Bodleian Library which had a wonderful exhibition of children’s books from the Opie collection. It was truly a magical day for a bookaholic teenager, and I still remember it fondly.

Last year I found out that the Bodleian was having another exhibition that sorely tempted me to fly across the Atlantic once more. Magical Books: From the Middle Ages to Middle Earth featured artifacts related to the work of some of my favorite authors, including C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Susan Cooper, Philip Pullman, and Alan Garner, known as the “Oxford School” for their ties to the university. Along with ancient scrolls and manuscripts from the Bodleian collection that are known or presumed to have inspired their work, there were artifacts from the authors themselves, such as Lewis’s hand-drawn map of Narnia, Tolkien’s dust jacket design for The Two Towers, and a set of replicas of the Six Signs of Power made for Susan Cooper.

Alas, I wasn’t able to make it in person, but the Bodleian did put up images of many of the exhibited item on their website, which you can still view here. They also produced a companion book called Magical Tales: Myth, Legend and Enchantment in Children’s Books, which I promptly purchased. It is a lovely high-quality paperback, about 7 inches square, with a nice, heavy wraparound cover (I love these because I can use them instead of a bookmrak), excellent layout and typography, and beautifully reproduced full-color images. So just as a physical object, the book is certainly a success.

Content-wise, the book contains five academic essays. The first is a general consideration of “magical books,” which can refer both to ancient books of spells and alchemy and to modern fantasy literature about magical happenings. The next three essays take on three areas of influence and inspiration for children’s writers, particularly those of the “Oxford School”: Northern mythology, the Middle Ages, and Arthurian legend. The final essay looks at the book itself as a magical, transforming object, in the form of early movable books for children. With a generally readable, engaging style, each essay gives a decent overview of its respective topic. Sometimes I wished for a bit more depth, as the essays tend to briefly survey a lot of books without going much into any one of them, but there isn’t really space for that in this small, heavily illustrated book. (Note that those illustrations include some drawn from the Bodleian exhibition, but not all; it’s not a “catalogue” of the exhibition. The map, dust jacket, and replica signs mentioned above, for example, are not included.)

So, for some armchair traveling into the sources of my favorite magical books, Magical Tales was a great investment, and a lot cheaper than a plane ticket. If you share my love of these fantasy classics, you might want to take a look at it too.

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