Four Fantastic Animal Illustrations from an Old Danish Encyclopedia
These animal illustrations are from a 1960’s edition of Danish Lademann’s Encyclopedia. The illustrator has done an impressive job of squeezing all the animals into their respective habitats or families, resulting in these fantastic and somewhat surrealistic illustrations. They are however perfectly in tune with the encyclopedia of the past century, before the creation of Wikipedia and the internet – Get as much information as possible compressed into your limited volumes of books. As a summer temp at an antiquarian book shop in the Norwegian Book Town, I have unfortunately seen a lot of these old encyclopedias end up in the paper recycling. I’ve saved a few, but realizing there is a limit to how many old encyclopedias I need in my book shelf I have also dissected many of them, resulting in a great collection of old illustrations.
DUKEPOPE 
These lovely illustrations was also used in the Spanish encyclopedia “Monitor”, published by Editorial Salvat in Spain and Latin America at the same time. Very pleasant to find them here… greetings!
April 29, 2014 at 4:08 pm
Interesting. I guess the old fashioned encyclopedia was such an expensive product to produce, that they were forced to rationalize and cooperate across borders. It’s hard to think of a media product in today’s world that would require so much labour, but no profit until after the release on the market. I know from Norway of a publishing house that went down due to an unsuccessful encyclopedia.
April 30, 2014 at 8:47 am