Lisbeth Zwerger’s Rare and Soulful 1984 Illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s “The Selfish Giant”

A bittersweet tale of transformation and self-transcendence through a single act of kindness.

From Austrian artist Lisbeth Zwerger — who also gave us those impossibly imaginative illustrations for Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz — comes a rare 1984 illustrated edition of The Selfish Giant (public library), one of the five short stories in Oscar Wilde’s 1888 collection for children, The Happy Prince and Other Tales.

The story was written at a pivotal time in Wilde’s life: professionally, it was wedged between his foray into professional journalism in 1887 as editor of The Woman’s World and his only novel, the 1890 classic The Picture of Dorian Gray; personally, it was nestled between the peak of his marital troubles and his intense love affair with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas.

In that turbulent context, it is perhaps befitting that Wilde would gravitate toward something soulful, symbolic, and ultimately bittersweet: When the selfish giant bans the children from playing in his garden, Spring refuses to come and the garden sinks into an unending winter. One day, the giant is awakened to discover that the children have found a way to sneak in through a hole in the wall. He is gripped with regret over his surly behavior and vows to demolish the wall, but as he emerges from his castle to welcome the children, they all run for their lives — except one little boy in the midst of trying to climb a tree. Rather than scold, the giant helps the child climb the tree and gets a hug and a kiss in return, which melts his heart. But then, the giant disappears, only to come back many years later, as an old man returning to die under the tree, covered in white spring blossoms.

It’s a simple yet immeasurably sweet story — the story of transformation and self-transcendence through one’s own single act of kindness, and Zwerger’s subtle yet infinitely expressive illustrations add beautiful dimension to Wilde’s wistful hopefulness.

Zwerger’s The Selfish Giant is long out of print, but surviving copies can still be found online and at some libraries. Complement it with Oscar Wilde on art, then revisit Zwerger’s enchanting reimaginings of Wonderland and Oz.

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Carson McCullers’s Little-Known 1964 Illustrated Children’s Book

Refreshingly direct verses with a strong existential bend and an undercurrent of science and astronomy.

As a lover of little-known children’s books by famous authors of literature for grown-ups — including these gems by Mark Twain, Aldous Huxley, Maya Angelou, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and J.R.R. Tolkien — I was thrilled to discover that in 1964, Carson McCullers penned Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as Pig (public library), a charming collection of short verses for young readers illustrated by the acclaimed German set designer and painter Rolf Gérard.

Written three years before her death, by which point McCullers had suffered multiple strokes and had lived with the entire left side of her body paralyzed for more than 15 years, the refreshingly direct poems straddle a peculiar balance between innocent optimism and wistful contemplation.

Many of the poems not only have an existential bend, concerned with such contemporary questions of science and philosophy as the nature of nothingness and why the world exists, but they also exude a palpable enchantment with science, astronomy, and cosmology — no doubt due to being written during the golden age of space exploration.

HOW HIGH IS THE SKY

The sky is higher than a tree I know.
I know it’s higher than an airplane
But when at night there is a starry sky —
I wonder which is higher
Stars or sky?

I SOMETIMES WONDER

I do not wonder where everything is.
Everywhere is shops and children, trees and air,
Our gate, our garden, these are everywhere.
But Mama darling, Papa dear, I sometimes wonder
Where is nowhere?

THE UNSEEN

I’ve seen a mountain,
I’ve seen the shore,
I’ve seen so many, many things more;
I’ve seen fireflies who light up in the dark,
I’ve even seen Yellowstone Park.
But the thing that I, and anybody else has
Never seen, I swear,
Neither I nor anybody else has ever seen air.

ASTRONAUT

I’m not afraid of space ships or orbital flights
Where the lights are blue and purple and
There is a zooming sound.
I lie in my space suit important and brave
While zip zing the world goes round.

Today at recess Buddy dared me to fly
To the moon, dared and double dared.
While I was thinking he called me chicken.
I was only thinking that if Daddy went first
I would not be so scared.

I am afraid of the black-patched pirate.
I am afraid of Captain Hook
And of dares and double dares,
While I was only thinking that if Daddy went first
I would not be so scared.

Others pull into question the seeming absurdities of adult conventions:

A RAT AND A RAINBOW

This afternoon the sun shone while it showered.
This afternoon there was a rainbow —
Bands of orange, gold and red, like many-colored flowers
Bent in a big bow across the sky.
Children ran across wet grass, pointing at the
Rainbow shouting, “Look, oh my!”
Why is it rude to point at people,
But not to point at a rat or a rainbow?

Others still are bittersweet, even decidedly wistful, exploring such darker subjects as loneliness, hopelessness, and the interplay between badness and sadness:

GIRAFFE

At the zoo I saw: A long-necked, velvety Giraffe
Whose small head, high above the strawy, zoo-y smells
Seemed to be dreaming
Was she dreaming of African jungles and African plains
That she would never see again?

SPORT WILLIAMS

I knew Sport Williams in second grade
He was a bad boy.
He was a repeater.
Failed in his number work,
Scribbled in his reader.
He threw spitballs.
He stole money,
And always lied and said
He had not done it.

When Betty had a sore toe
And had to go to school
With a cut-out bedroom slipper
Sport jumped into the air
And stayed there
Until he landed on Betty’s sore toe
In the cut-out bedroom slipper
On Purpose!

Oh! Sport was a bad boy.
No one loved him but his mother.
And when he was suspended, she said, “He was not
A bad boy,
But a sad boy…” because
No one loved him but her, his mother.

PANDORA’S BOX

There was a little girl called Pandora
Who opened a magic box.
The magic box was a tragic box,
So look what happened to poor Pandora.

SWEET AS A PICKLE AND CLEAN AS A PIG

When you’re sweet as a pickle
And clean as a pig —
I’ll give you a nickel
And dance you a jig.

Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as Pig, should you be so lucky to track down a surviving copy, is an absolute treasure. Complement it with Sylvia Plath’s little-known children’s verses, Gertrude Stein’s posthumous alphabet book, and Mark Twain’s Advice to Little Girls.

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Lisbeth Zwerger’s Imaginative Illustrations for Alice in Wonderland

“Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined…”

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, commonly shorthanded to Alice in Wonderland, isn’t only one of the most imaginative and influential children’s books of all time, but also one of the most enduringly alluring to artists for visual reinterpretation — no doubt precisely due to its fanciful nature and bold subversion of reality. Since John Tenniel’s original illustrations, the Carroll classic has been reimagined by such visionary artists as Leonard Weisgard, Ralph Steadman, Yayoi Kusama, John Vernon Lord, and even Salvador Dalí.

As an enormous admirer of Austrian artist Lisbeth Zwerger’s mind and work, I was thrilled to track down a used copy of a sublime out-of-print edition of Alice in Wonderland (public library) featuring Zwerger’s inventive, irreverent, and tenderly tantalizing drawings, published in 1999, three years after her enchanting reimagining of The Wizard of Oz.

The book begins with Carroll’s prefatory poem from the book, which recounts the afternoon boat trip on which he first told the Alice in Wonderland story to the three little Liddell sisters — Lorina (“Prima”), Alice (“Secunda”), the real-life girl who inspired the tale, and Edith (“Tertia”):

All in the golden afternoon
Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
By little arms are plied,
While little hands make vain pretence
Our wanderings to guide.

Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour,
Beneath such dreamy weather,
To beg a tale of breath too weak
To stir the tiniest feather!
Yet what can one poor voice avail
Against three tongues together?

Imperious Prima flashes forth
Her edict to “begin it”:
In gentler tones Secunda hopes
“There will be nonsense in it!”
While Tertia interrupts the tale
Not more than once a minute.

Anon, to sudden silence won,
In fancy they pursue
The dream-child moving through a land
Of wonders wild and new,
In friendly chat with bird or beast —
And half believe it true.

And ever, as the story drained
The wells of fancy dry,
And faintly strove that weary one
To put the subject by,
“The rest next time—” “It is next time!”
The happy voices cry.

Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:
Thus slowly, one by one,
Its quaint events were hammered out—
And now the tale is done,
And home we steer, a merry crew,
Beneath the setting sun.

Alice! A childish story take,
And with a gentle hand,
Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined
In Memory’s mystic band,
Like pilgrim’s wither’d wreath of flowers
Pluck’d in far-off land.

What makes Zwerger’s aesthetic particularly bewitching is her ability to render even the wildest feats of fancy in a soft and subdued style that tickles the imagination into animating the characters and scenes with life.

Though Alice in Wonderland is currently out of print, you can still find used copies online and at the library. Complement it with some radically different takes on the Carroll classic from Ralph Steadman, Yayoi Kusama, and John Vernon Lord.

Some of Zwerger’s prints, including one of the Alice cover illustration, are available on ArtKandy.

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Salvador Dalí’s Rare, Erotic Vintage Cookbook

A surreally sensual love letter to the palate.

“When I was six years old,” Salvador Dalí once professed, “I wanted to be a cook.” But it wasn’t until his late sixties that he channeled his childhood fantasy into Les Diners de Gala (public library) — a lavishly illustrated cookbook, originally published in 1973 and featuring Dalí’s intensely erotic etchings and paintings. The twelve chapters each cover a specific class of dishes — from exotic courses to fish and shellfish to vegetables — rendered with a surrealist twist both gastronomically and aesthetically, but nowhere more so than in the tenth chapter, dedicated to aphrodisiacs.

Prefacing the recipes is Dalí’s unambiguous cautionary disclaimer, penned at the dawn of the first major dieting era of popular culture:

We would like to state clearly that, beginning with the very first recipes, Les Diners de Gala, with its precepts and its illustrations, is uniquely devoted to the pleasures of Taste. Don’t look for dietetic formulas here.

We intend to ignore those charts and tables in which chemistry takes the place of gastronomy. If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you.

Also found throughout the book are Dalí’s amusingly dramatic proclamations, vacillating between the semi-sensical and the philosophic, applied here to the realm of gastronomy. To wit:

I only like to eat what has a clear and intelligible form. If I hate that detestable degrading vegetable called spinach it is because it is shapeless, like Liberty.

I attribute capital esthetic and moral values to food in general, and to spinach in particular. The opposite of shapeless spinach, is armor. I love eating suits of arms, in fact I love all shell fish… food that only a battle to peel makes it vulnerable to the conquest of our palate.

And:

The Jaw is our best tool to grasp philosophical knowledge. Disgust is the ever present watchman of my table, sternly overseeing my meals obliging me to choose my food with caution.

CONGER OF THE RISING SUN

6 slices of conger eel
6 slices of fatty bacon
1 caul (casing which will be stuffed)
12 small lettuce leaves
12 oz raw soya beans (or canned soya)
6 teaspoons of heavy cream
1 tablespoon of butter
1 tablespoon of flour
1 teaspoon of curry powder
Cayenne pepper

First of all, let us prepare the slices of conger eel by removing the skin and the central bone, one by one. Then place the pieces on a strip of bacon (cut to match the size of the piece of eel) and each of these on to a much larger piece of the caul. Add salt and pepper, then, on each piece of the eel, put a leaf of lettuce, on top of which you add 2 oz of soya beans (raw soya is the best, but canned soya will do). Sprinkle then with curry powder, salt, pepper. Pour a teaspoon of heavy cream over it, cover with a second leaf of lettuce and tuck in the caul on the four sides to wrap up all the ingredients of this recipe.

Using a very large skillet cook the fish slices on top of the range, simmering slowly, in a tablespoon of butter for 40 minutes. Be sure to go about it gently. Remove the slices and keep them warm; in the skillet, add the flour. Do not let it get brown; combine with the heavy cream and curry, taste for seasoning. Let it all boil for a little while and pour over the slices of the conger eel.

CRAYFISH CONSOMMÉ

2 ¼ lbs of crayfish (or shrimp)
2 quarts of water
Cayenne pepper
2 tablespoons of paprika
saffron
1 lb of veal chopped
4 fistfuls of rice
4 egg yolks

In a big pot you pour the water, salt, a dash of Cayenne pepper, paprika, saffron, chopped veal, and rice.

As soon as the broth begins to boil, crush your crayfish in a mortar, one after the other. Be sure to really crush them to a pulp and add them progressively to the broth. Keep it boiling for 45 minutes.

The broth is then strained “Chinese style” i.e.; in a sieve that you can push with a wooden spoon so as to get all the juice out. Put back on the fire, stir and add the egg yolks without letting it boil. Your consommé is ready. May I suggest that you serve it with thin garlic toasts.

THOUSAND YEAR OLD EGGS

1 dozen eggs
1 ½ quarts of water
5 whole cloves
3 tablespoons of sugar
3 tablespoons of vinegar
Tabasco sauce
2 lemons (cut in 8 pieces)
¾ teaspoon of thyme
4 tea-bags
2 onions
2 cloves of garlic

You certainly know these thousand year old eggs, one of the crowns of Chinese cuisine. We will not presume here to reach their ultimate perfection, but we will simply try to help you follow an amusing recipe which has the advantage of being prepared ahead of time.

First, boil the eggs for ten minutes in salted boiling water. Then take them out, put them under cold running water which will make it easier to shell them. In the same water in which the eggs had boiled, add the cloves, sugar, vinegar, a lot of Tabasco sauce, the lemons (cut in eighths) and thyme. Boil for 15 minutes. Shut off the flame, dip in the tea-bag and let them steep for 10 minutes.

In a jar, put the diced onions and garlic. Add the shelled eggs, and pour the broth so that the eggs are completely immersed. Close the jar and keep it on the lower shelf of your refrigerator.

Be patient for three weeks before opening the jar and serving. These eggs go well with cold meats and fish.

TOP ROUND “EROS”

1 tablespoon shortening
1 Toulouse sausage
2 lbs top round
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
4 anchovies
2 onions sliced
6 tomatoes seeded and cut into pieces
2 red peppers
6 stalks celery
3 quarts water

First buy the sausage then hand it over to your butcher so that he can cut a piece of top round that will wrap around it. Fry the sausage in the shortening for about 10 minutes. Brush the one side of the top round with mustard; put the anchovies on top, then the sausage, roll, tie up with string.

In a Dutch oven, brown the meat in shortening. When the meat turns golden, replace it with the onions, and when they are golden, add the tomatoes as well as the garlic and red peppers.

Cover after a while. The tomatoes will produce a juice and start boiling; put the meat back and salt carefully (because of the anchovies).

Simmer gently for 1 ½ hours.

Pare the celery stalks, cut off the green parts and tips of leaves, peel the root.

Cut it in half and wash thoroughly, especially between the leaves.

Bring salted water to a boil and cook the celery for 15 minutes. Cool under running water. After half an hour, place the celery around the top round.

It will cook in the meat juice for one hour.

CASANOVA COCKTAIL

The juice of 1 orange
1 tablespoon bitters (Campari)
1 teaspoon ginger
4 tablespoons brandy
2 tablespoons old brandy (Vielle Cure)
1 pinch Cayenne pepper

This is quite appropriate when circumstances such as exhaustion, overwork or simply excess of sobriety are calling for a pick-me-up.

Here is a well-tested recipe to fit the bill.

Let us stress another advantage of this particular pep-up concoction is that one doesn’t have to make the sour face that usually accompanies the absorption of a remedy.

At the bottom of a glass, combine pepper and ginger. Pour the bitters on top, then brandy and “Vielle Cure.” Refrigerate or even put in the freezer.

Thirty minutes later, remove from the freezer and stir the juice of the orange into the chilled glass.

Drink… and wait for the effect.

It is rather speedy.

Les Diners de Gala is now so rare that surviving copies, to say nothing of those very rare signed ones, cost a fortune. Complement it with more little-known treasures at the intersection of food and the arts, including The Futurist Cookbook, The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook, Dinah Fried’s beautiful photographs of meals from famous fiction, and Wild Raspberries, the little-known cookbook young Andy Warhol did with his mother.

For more of Dalí’s lesser-known creative projects and commissions, see his illustrations for Don Quixote, the essays of Montaigne, Alice in Wonderland, Romeo and Juliet, The Divine Comedy, and the twelve signs of the zodiac.

Thanks, Elena

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