Book Review: The Illustrators Series

Posted on December 26, 2023 at 8:53 am by Gene Ambaum

If you didn’t get any books that wowed you for the holidays, these three volumes of The Illustrators series would be a great end of December gift to yourself. Each has a mix of text (biography and bits about the artist’s work), finished illustrations, and sketches.

Tove Jansson (The Illustrators) by Paul Gravett. Series consultant Quentin Blake. Series Editor Claudia Zeff. Thames & Hudson, 2022. 9780500094334. 112pp.

This volume has a few bits of non-Moomin work, including a self-portrait in oils, though most of the illustrations are of Jansson’s most famous characters. There are, unfortunately, only a few early versions of her illustrations for The Hobbit inside.

Posy Simmonds (The Illustrators) by Paul Gravett. Series consultant Quentin Blake. Series Editor Claudia Zeff. Thames & Hudson, 2019. 9780500022139. 112pp.

Simmonds started making comics when she was very young, and there are examples from when she was nine or ten. The book places more emphasis on her editorial illustrations and comics for adults (Cassandra Darke, Gemma Bovary, Tamara Drewe, and Mrs. Weber’s Diary) than her picture book illustrations, though I probably wouldn’t give this book to a child. My favorite drawing in the book is of her workspace.

Ludwig Bemelmans (The Illustrators) by Quentin Blake and Laurie Britton Newell. Series consultant Quentin Blake. Series Editor Claudia Zeff. Thames & Hudson, 2019. 9780500519950. 112pp.

The fantastic thing about many of Bemelmans’ art is that they’re so simple that it’s easy to see how they were drawn, yet so elegant that it’s also easy to see his genius. I loved Madeline before I picked this up, but this book made me a fan, and now I’m out to track down a few of his other books that I first saw here.