The history of artistic takes on literary classics is long and colorful. There are William Blake’s paintings for Milton’s Paradise Lost and for Dante’s Divine Comedy, Picasso’s drawings for a naughty ancient Greek comedy, Matisse’s etchings for Ulysses, and Salvador Dalí’s prolific illustrations for Don Quixote in 1946, the essays of Montaigne in 1947, The Divine Comedy in 1957, Alice in Wonderland in 1969, and Romeo and Juliet in 1975. In recent years, we’ve seen such visual treats as Matt Kish’s illustrations for Moby-Dick and Heart of Darkness and Yayoi Kusama’s take on Alice in Wonderland.

Now, from the Folio Society — who also gave us those gorgeous illustrated editions of Irish Myths and Legends and the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook — comes an exquisite edition of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, illustrated by artist John Vernon Lord. In his whimsical and wonderfully weird collage-like drawings, Joyce’s experimental narrative, seventeen years in the making, and idiosyncratic storytelling blossom to new life.

Lord, who set out to illustrate the Joyce classic in order to better understand it, writes in the introduction:

Reading such a text as Joyce’s, and interpreting it, is a greater challenge than for most books. After all each word is “as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons.” Sometimes I felt like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass when she first read “Jabberwocky.” She commented, “It seems very pretty… but it’s rather hard to understand… Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas — only I don’t exactly know what they are!” Finnegans Wake is a book that has to be experienced rather than fully understood.

As a lover of artists’ sketchbooks and creators’ notebooks, I was especially taken with this glimpse of Lord’s notebooks, revealing his necessarily messy but clearly fruitful creative process:

Compare and contrast the Folio Society edition with a wholly different take on the Joyce classic, artist Jacob Drachler’s vintage typographic “confabulation” Id-Grids and Ego-Graphs, then complement with these lovely illustrations for James Joyce’s children’s book.

via The Guardian