Weird and Wonderful: Discoveries from the Mysterious World of Forgotten Children’s Books

Drawn from the archives of the Blue Lantern Studio (Poltarnees is a pen name for Blue Lantern cofounder Harold Darling) this compilation of excerpts and illustrations from 19th- and early 20th-century picture books should captivate connoisseurs and curious young readers with an artistic bent. Palmer Cox’s Brownies make an appearance, as do offerings from Johnny Gruelle, Edward Lear, and Dorothy Kunhardt, but most of the images are little-known rarities from the vault, often paired with the verse that accompanied them. Every page holds a surprise: a 1916 work by Hazel Frazee has a pair of elegant “chocolate ladies” playing dominoes, while an anonymous 1884 illustration depicts a hive of winged capital letter Bs carrying signs that read “cheerful,” “penitent,” etc. Poltarnees’s brief, glowing commentary is largely superfluous (“The Swiss artist Ernst Kreidolf, in a wonderfully consistent body of work, shows us the wonderful beings who inhabit the world of plants”), as the whimsical, bizarre, and sometimes nightmarish illustrations stand alone as fascinating relics of bygone eras in children’s publishing. Readers will likely long for more of the beguiling images: luckily, as Poltarnees notes in his introduction, “There are thousands more buried in our library.” All ages. (June)