Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, now known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations of birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; and as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry.
Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English writer, artist, poet, and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. The four works were part of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, the completion of which was prevented by his death. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, but Peake's surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.
Robert Fleming Rankin is a prolific British author of comedic fantasy novels. Born in Parsons Green, London, he started writing in the late 1970s, and first entered the bestsellers lists with Snuff Fiction in 1999, by which time his previous eighteen books had sold around one million copies. His books are a mix of science fiction, fantasy, the occult, urban legends, running gags, metafiction, steampunk and outrageous characters. According to the biography printed in some Corgi editions of his books, Rankin refers to his style as 'Far Fetched Fiction' in the hope that bookshops will let him have a section to himself. Many of Rankin's books are bestsellers.
Scott Frederick Turow is an American author and lawyer. Turow has written 11 fiction and three nonfiction books, which have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 30 million copies. Films have been based on several of his books.
The Joy of Sex is a 1972 illustrated sex manual by British author Alex Comfort. An updated edition was released in September 2008.
David Hockney is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.
Sir William Newzam Prior Nicholson was a British painter of still-life, landscape and portraits. He also worked as a printmaker in techniques including woodcut, wood-engraving and lithography, as an illustrator, as an author of children's books and as a designer for the theatre.
William Wegman is an American artist best known for creating series of compositions involving dogs, primarily his own Weimaraners in various costumes and poses.
Jeremy Adler is a British scholar and poet, and emeritus professor and senior research fellow at King's College London. As a poet he is known especially for his concrete poetry and artist's books. As an academic he is known for his work on German literature specialising in the Age of Goethe, Romanticism, Expressionism and Modernism with contributions on figures such as Goethe, Hölderlin, and Kafka.
The Ultimate Alphabet (ISBN 1-85145-050-5) is a best-selling book by Mike Wilks. It is a collection of 26 paintings, each depicting a collection of objects starting with a particular letter of the alphabet. It was published in 1986 as a competition with a £10 000 prize, closing in 1988. Unlike children's alphabet books, it contains unusual words, and is extremely intricately painted, with the paintings in a realistic style, but rendered surrealistic by the strange juxtaposition of subject matter. Wilks himself appears at least once in every painting, as does his trademark snail. Some of Wilks's appearances are less prominent than others; the hardest to spot is in the "W" painting, where he appears in a tiny cameo on a reproduction of the cover of his earlier book Weather Works.
John Z. Robinson is a New Zealand painter, printmaker, and jeweller. He has lived in Dunedin, New Zealand since 1978.
Mark Podwal is an artist, author, filmmaker and physician. He may have been best known initially for his drawings on The New York Times Op-Ed page. In addition, he is the author and illustrator of numerous books. Most of these works — Podwal's own as well as those he has illustrated for others— typically focus on Jewish legend, history and tradition. His art is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Israel Museum, the National Gallery of Prague, the Jewish Museums in Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, Prague, New York, among many other venues.
Mitsumasa Anno was a Japanese illustrator and writer of children's books, known best for picture books with few or no words. He received the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1984 for his "lasting contribution to children's literature."
Michael Bidlo is an American conceptual artist who employs painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, and other forms of "social sculpture."
Michael Francis Gibson was an American art critic, art historian, writer and independent scholar, who published regularly in the International Herald Tribune, 1969–2004 and occasionally in other publications in English, and French. From 1956 on, Gibson published a number of books, articles, essays and poems in both English and French.
Christopher Wormell is an English printmaker, principally known for his illustrated books.
John Christie has worked as both a visual artist and a broadcast film-maker over the years. As a maker of artists’ books since 1975, he has produced more than 20 limited editions for both the renowned Circle Press and his own imprint Objectif. He co-authored, with John Berger, the award-winning book I Send You This Cadmium Red. His prints, drawings and artists’ books are in many collections worldwide including the Tate Gallery, the V&A, the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, New York Public Library and the National Library of Australia.
Eugene Victor Thaw was an American art dealer and collector. He was the owner of an art gallery on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and a past president of the Art Dealers Association of America. With his wife, he donated over 1,000 works of art to the Fenimore Art Museum and the Morgan Library & Museum.
Margaret Courtney-Clarke is a Namibian documentary photographer and photojournalist, living in Swakopmund. Her work "frequently explores the resilience of communities enduring the rapidly shifting landscapes of Namibia." Courtney-Clarke has made a trilogy of books on the art of African women: Ndebele (1986), African Canvas (1990), and Imazighen (1996). She has collaborated on books with David Goldblatt and Maya Angelou.
