There’s been a dangerous development of sorts at our house. Not that we haven’t been on the cusp of it for years, but recently some of my husband’s and my individual passions have become very much intertwined. I’m worried we won’t be able to balance each other out.
I don’t mean to make it sound like we’ve never shared interests, before. Not at all—I married another musician, for one thing—one who, like me, actually read books for pleasure while pursuing a graduate degree in music. When we go to a bookstore together we will invariably meet up in the children’s section, wherever else each of us happens to wander in the meantime. We have similar or at least complementary opinions about family, music, art, education, and lifestyle. But we’ve always kept little niches to ourselves, too. It gets dangerous, otherwise—nobody to keep us from going overboard.
In terms of books, we agree that owning them and reading them is good. But he gets a lot more excited about rare books than I do. I am happy to have an ex-library edition of something if it is a good book. The more worn and dog-eared it is, the more I figure it has been loved and has proved its worth. To him, the writing is still supremely important, but a book is only enhanced by being old, leather-bound, gilt-edged, and rare. I appreciate those things, but the fact remains that I am stingy, and always less likely to buy the fancy version. Thus—balance.
Recently, though, my husband discovered Calla Editions, distributed by Dover Books. These good people have a short list of books (they’ve only been around since 2008), but many of them are reprints of classics: Grimm's Fairy Tales
illustrated by Arthur Rackham, The Arabian Nights
illustrated by René Bull, Stories from Hans Christian Andersen
illustrated by Edmund Dulac, The Knave of Hearts
illustrated by Maxfield Parrish, and maybe one of my all-time favorite books, East of the Sun and West of the Moon
illustrated by Kay Nielsen. They are beautiful, hardcover books, and they are priced like nice hardcovers, not like rare antiques.
And so we have come to own, among others, a reprint of East of the Sun and West of the Moon
. I hardly know what to say about this book, it is so close to me. I grew up on a shortened version, with only six of the fifteen original stories, published by Doubleday & Co., Inc. in 1977. (The original book came out in 1914; the Calla Edition is a reproduction of that.) It is a collection of Scandinavian fairy tales culled from Asbjörnsen and Moe’s “Norske Folkeeventyr,” Asbjörnsen and Moe being to Norway what the Brothers Grimm were to Germany. The stories are wonderful—spare, mysterious, full of trolls and princesses and impoverished young men who make their way in the world through their own cunning and the help of magical creatures they have aided along the way. But the artwork—that is the book’s magnificence. I believe the illustrations have single-handedly defined what my Scandinavian heritage means to me—well, maybe along with the Norwegian desserts we always ate at Christmastime and multiple readings of D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths. But really—the artwork is amazing. Kay Nielsen was a Danish artist whose name was linked with “the golden age of illustration” along with artists like Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac. His work has distinct Art Nouveau and Japanese influences. It is stylized, graceful, and full of magic. The color illustrations in this book are drenched with color and detail, and the black and white illustrations are equally detailed, but more austere. I am at a loss to tell you today if I love gnarled weeping trees, stylized flowers, rocky terrains, and a particular sort of play of light against dark because I was born with that aesthetic or because of this book. Follow this link to see what I'm talking about.Honestly, this book and the others like it qualify as fine art as much as literature.
And so passions have collided. “But see, it’s not dangerous,” my husband told me yesterday. “Because we can actually afford these editions.” Which in my mind is precisely where the danger lies.
