It's a mystery to me why, although we rightly celebrate (and collect) the works of Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Harry Clarke and so on... the book illustrators of the mid-twentieth century are virtually unknown and hardly collected as such at all. (I exaggerate of course, there are galleries which keep work of this period and collectors who buy the original artwork when they can but I really don't know many who actually collect books in this field) In my, very humble, opinion one of the very best of these has to be Charles Keeping (1924-1988) whose work has been seen on Front Free Endpaper before when we had some illustrations from a book by Rosemary Sutcliff. And today I came across these wonderful examples in The Twelve Labours of Hercules by Robert Newman, a Beaver Book from 1973.
