Csoda Album (Wonder Album).
Budapest: Pesti Napló Kiadasa, 1911.
4to, 131 pp., with 12 full-page color plates by Heinrich Lefler and Joseph Urban; pictorial endpapers; decorated initials, title page and chapter headings in color; other tinted illustrations by Czech artists. Original gilt-stamped pictorial green cloth, boards lightly marked, chipped at foot of backstrip, occasional creasing to printed tissue guards; very good.
§ First edition of this lovely Hungarian Art Nouveau gift book. In the preface the editor describes his own fairy tale quest for successful book production, addressed "to the peaceful reconciliation of the fairy, the poet, the writer, the painter, the draftsman and the reader". Further on he encounters also the machine master, the zincographer, and the proofreader in his quest to produce a fairy tale book suitable for "fifty or sixty year old babies". The principal illustrators, responsible for the 12 full-page color plates, were the Austrian brothers-in-law Heinrich Lefler and Joseph Urban, who had rebelled against the Vienna Künstlerhaus and become prominent early members of the Hagenbund group. Together they designed costumes, interiors, furniture, accessories, and illustrated works including a Hans Andersen calendar for 1911 in which these illustrations first appeared. (Jospeh Urban emigrated to the United States where among many other commissions he designed the interior and exterior decoration of Mar-a-Lago.). Item #127061
Price: $495.00