Oscar Wilde's fairy tales are some of his most elegant and charming pieces of writing.
He produced two books of fairy tales -- The Happy Prince and Other Tales, and A House of Pomegranates . They've rarely been collected in one volume -- and never with stunning artwork by Yuko Shimizu (The Unwritten, Barbed Wire Baseball, A Wild Swan), one of the modern masters of illustration and graphic art. Wilde's original fairy tales are moving, sweet, sad and magical -- much like Yuko's artwork. Yuko is one of the most celebrated and admired editorial illustrators in the world, and her work is perfectly aligned with Wilde's witty, rueful voice. The edition also features an original introduction by the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Cunningham. Illuminated Editions is a series of works of classic fiction, prose, and poetry, beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated in exquisitely produced small-batch editions.
These volumes intend to harken back to the lovingly crafted, handsomely bound illustrated books of the Victorian era and the golden age of illustration, re-imagined using modern design sensibilities and the most modern techniques in presentation, book-craft, and printing.
About the Author
Yuko Shimizu is a Japanese illustrator based in New York City and instructor at School of Visual Arts. Newsweek Japan has chosen Yuko as one of "100 Japanese People The World Respects" in 2009. Her first self-titled monograph came out in 2011 (Gestalten), and her second was released from ROADS Publishing in spring of 2016. Other books include: A Wild Swan (collaboration with novelist Michael Cunningham, FSG, 2015) and a multi award winning children's book Barbed Wire Baseball (written by Marissa Moss, Abrams, 2013). You may have seen her work on The Gap T-shirts, Pepsi cans, VISA billboards, Microsoft and Target ads, as well as on the book covers of Penguin, Scholastic, DC Comics, and on the pages of NY Times, Time, Rolling Stone, New Yorker and in many other publications over last ten years.
Industry Reviews
"I feel certain that these stories have waited almost 130 years to find their true, visual mates - to find, in Shimizu's illustration, a gift that actually stands up to Wilde's in its unflinching embrace of the fabulous, complex, magical world in which we have always lived." THE FAIRY TALES OF OSCAR WILDE has won the Communication Arts Design Competition, and won Bronze and Silver Cubes from the Art Director's club in the categories of Design and Illustration.
"These editions hearken the illustrious past of bookmaking, while also adding a tantalizing contemporary take." -- Sarah Rose Sharp * Hyperallergic *
"Shimuzu's illustrations are varied, powerful, and often evoke batik and other resist-dyeing techniques. As impressive as the illustrations are, the design of the book matches them with elegance and inspired use of color and pattern to set each story in its own frame...These limited-edition crowd-funded volumes raise the bar to the highest level of quality and artistry." -- Karen Haber * LOCUS Magazine *
"Produced in the spirit of the books that Wilde himself saw through the press, [this volume] certainly constitutes one of the most beautiful, artistically designed editions of any of Wilde's writings." -- Nicholas Frankel * The Wildean *
