Carol Belanger Grafton

For those who know me, Art Nouveau is my period. I am particularly well read in it, and have had several hundred desktop pieces glorifying my abodes. Dover has published countless little books on and with elements of Art Nouveau design, from cloth to wallpaper to glass and everything in between. They have been enormously useful to artists and designers looking for inspiration or outright theft, and anything to leverage the most pleasant ambience provided by Art Nouveau is welcome.

This new show more offering from Dover is a little different, because it takes graphic designs from other Dover books on Art Nouveau. It’s sort of a meta collection. The book is sectioned by country, so you can see how (very) different each one’s Art Nouveau was. Typically, some major artist set the tone and style, and derivations bloomed. Mackintosh in Scotland, Beardsley in England, Moser in Austria, Hoffmann in Germany, …. The whole period lasted from the mid 1890s to the early 1920s, and was subsumed by Art Deco, whose seeds are clearly evident, particularly in Austrian and German Art Nouveau (Jugendstil). show less

This is a pretty neat book with a wide variety of designs, and some of them were super weird. My only real complaint was that some of the alphabets did not contain all the letters, which just seemed weird to me. There's sets of letters with a more classical feel to them, and there's one that was obviously inspired by architectural floor plans. Overall a fun visual book.

While the internet has yielded countless photos available to be snagged (legally or not), old illustrations from before the 20th century are less easy to come by. This collection offers a fine treasury of over 500 animal illustrations from the 19th century, illustrations that are now in the public domain and available for a variety of uses.

The original illustrations were rendered in pen-and-ink in great detail, and are reprinted here in black and white with high resolution. Having been show more printed on pages with blank backs, the illustrations can be cut out for use, or scanned digitally. Most are a few inches in size (ranging from 1.5 to 6 inches), with 10 to 20 per page.

Although sources of the illustrations are not given, they probably appeared in various old books and monographs on natural history and zoology, since most are rendered in scientific detail. The drawings are arranged more-or-less phylogenetically. Thus one page shows various monkeys and apes, while other pages are successively devoted to horses, canids, felids, elephants, hoofed mammals, rodents and marsupials, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, insects, and various other invertebrates. While not the most comprehensive such collection, this treasury has its uses. show less

Gorgeous! A great introduction to Art Nouveau that includes stencils, ceramics, some jewelry, illustrations, wallpaper, stained glass and posters, most in color. It's not extensive but will give the reader a great place to start research. I received a free copy of the ebook from NetGalley in exchange for a review.