#000431
Castles
David Day; illustrated by Alan Lee
*Castles* was the first collaboration between the artist Alan Lee and the writer David Day, published by Bantam in 1984 and designed by David Larkin—the team that would go on to shape a whole shelf of illustrated fantasy. Lee, later an Academy Award winner for his work on Peter Jackson's *Lord of the Rings* films, fills the book with atmospheric watercolors of ramparts and towers wreathed in mist. Day supplies the text: legends, folk tales, and fairy stories of castles drawn from across Europe, from England to Norway to Germany. The result is less a history of fortification than a gathering of the myths castles accumulate—the giants, ghosts, and imprisoned maidens. For anyone who loves Lee's dreamlike line or the folklore of the medieval imagination, it is a beautiful and enduringly collectible volume.
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The artist
Alan Lee is among the most admired illustrators of the fantastic, an English watercolorist whose misty, luminous style would later define the look of Tolkien's world on screen; he shared an Academy Award for art direction on The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. The text is by David Day, a Canadian-born author of many books on myth and Tolkien lore, and the volume was designed and edited by David Larkin, architect of a celebrated line of illustrated art books.
The book
Published by Bantam in 1984, Castles was the first of several Lee–Day collaborations. Rather than a technical history of fortification, it is a treasury of the stories castles attract—legends, folk tales, and fairy stories from England, Norway, Germany, and beyond—each an occasion for one of Lee's evocative full-color paintings.
How it has aged
The scholarship is light by design; the draw is the art and the atmosphere, and those endure. The book is now a sought-after collectible, prized above all for Lee's imagery, and it reads as a keepsake of a particular golden age of illustrated fantasy publishing.
For more context
It pairs with Lee's later, celebrated Tolkien illustration and with the wider vogue for illustrated folklore it helped define.
Sources - Amazon listing - Google Books
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- David Day; illustrated by Alan Lee
- Publisher
- Bantam Books
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1984
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Colorado
Places