On a Book Kick

This has been a weekend for inspiring illustration art! As Nana & Papa (Jay's grandparents) are preparing for moving out of their house, there is always the opportunity to un-earth lots of history and some neat stuff. Jay let me have these two books from her childhood. This one is great, and I remember having this myself in a smaller book/record format:



This one I had never seen or heard of before...it's from the 70s and by an illustrator named Gyo Fujikawa, who I will have to research more because I really like her style.


What I've found so far indicates she worked for Disney for awhile. Makes sense, as there is a slight Mary Blair flavor to some of her work. Jay grew up with this A to Z Picture Book which I just fell in love with today. Lots more where this came from, but here's a sample of some of my favorites (click to make bigger):






I scanned these to send to my friend Ward as I knew he would appreciate them...they are from The Golden Treasury of Myths & Legends illustrated by Alice & Martin Provensen.



This book originally belonged to my mom and somehow found its way into my book collection because I also grew up looking at it quite often, particularly in 6th grade during my Greek mythology obsession. Again, just a few samples of my favorite pages. To this day, whenever I hear Pandora's box mentioned, my mind immediately jumps to this image:







And now from the sublime to the ridiculous, another random occurence from a lazy Sunday evening...Ken decides to break out his Muppet Show records and have some giggles with Ariel.