#000217
Sindbad the Sailor and Other Stories from the Arabian Nights
Edmund Dulac (illus.)
An armful of a book: Laurence Housman's supple retellings of the great tales from the Thousand and One Nights — Sindbad's voyages, Aladdin, Ali Baba, the calendars — wrapped around twenty-three color plates by Edmund Dulac, first issued by Hodder & Stoughton in 1914. Dulac was one of the presiding talents of the Golden Age of illustration, and these images are him near his peak: jewel-toned, patterned like Persian miniatures, more interested in atmosphere than incident. The stories carry themselves, but people keep this book for the pictures, tipped in on heavy stock with tissue guards in the old gift-book manner. It's the sort of volume that turned a generation of children into lifelong readers of the fantastic, and it still lands that way — an object as much as a text.
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The artist
Edmund Dulac (1882–1953) was a French-born, London-based illustrator who, alongside Arthur Rackham and Kay Nielsen, defined the Golden Age of book illustration. Trained partly in Paris and drawn to Persian and Mughal miniatures, he favored watercolor and a flattened, decorative sense of space. He later designed stamps and banknotes, but his reputation rests on the lavish gift books of the 1900s and 1910s.
The book
First published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1914, the volume pairs Laurence Housman's retellings of stories from The Arabian Nights with twenty-three tipped-in color plates. Housman, a writer and illustrator in his own right, keeps the prose stately but readable; Dulac supplies the enchantment.
How it reads
The tales are episodic and strange — voyages, genies, transformations — and reward dipping in as much as straight reading. Dulac's plates now feel like the book's true draw, and later reprints (Dover, Calla) exist largely to keep them in circulation.
For more context
Sits naturally beside Dulac's Stories from Hans Andersen and Kay Nielsen's East of the Sun and West of the Moon as high points of Edwardian illustrated publishing.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Edmund Dulac (illus.)
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Colorado