Newsletter May 2021

Mythical Beasts

We can now show you Neil Packer's exquisite illustrations for Mythical Beasts, a new book produced by The Folio Society. He has produced a cover and some beautiful chapter heads and graphics for inside the book. As always, the production standards are gorgeously high and they perfectly suit Neil's work.

'Written by experts in their fields and edited by former British Museum curator John Cherry, this extensive history illuminates the roles that mythical beasts have played across cultures and reveals why they have retained their appeal from antiquity to the present day.'

We're delighted to announce the UK publication of the children's book written by Neil Armstrong and illustrated by Grahame Baker Smith. (US publication is in September). It explains how the Earth and the Moon came to be, and the adventure of the first moon landing.

Grahame's longtime interest had always been in space travel so he was perfectly equipped for this book &endash; but his other passion is for early life on this planet so it really was 'the double' for him as he'd just illustrated Life, The First Four Billion Years for Walker Books, a massive tome which takes in exactly the period Armstrong tells us about in his book.

This is John's latest book cover, The Last Shadow, for Tor Books. Much of his current work is for private commissions so there's less time to work on illustration but it remains a vital part of what he does.

Bloomsbury have announced the publication of a new book of Jim Kay's Harry Potter illustrations which includes some of his preparatory work for this mega series. They've cleverly selected short passages of text from the original books to accompany the illustrations, month by month.