Binding

Walter Crane

1875

Laminated paper on card

9½ x 6 inches

Another flamboyant cover design, which was used for a number of the Toy Books. Typically, Crane fuses several idioms: the vase, figure and enclosing border are neo-classical, while the fruit is distinctly Japanese; a Japanese lady, waving her fan, appears in one of the roundels. The intense colour, with its contrast of orange and blue, exemplifies Edmund Evans’s expert printing in colour. The superimposition of lettering panels, along with Crane’s bold assertion of authorship, completes the whole.

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Photograph and text by Simon Cooke

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