“I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations… I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages,” the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska wrote in her poignant poem “Possibilities.”

Old fine-lined illustrations and classic tales that outgrim the newspapers’ front pages, twisting the grisly into the sublime, come together in a rare 1933 edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (public library), with illustrations by the Irish stained-glass and book artist Harry Clarke (March 17, 1889–January 6, 1931), whose visionary work influenced the Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and French Symbolism movements.

Nearly a decade after I first featured Clarke’s black-and-white illustrations from an earlier edition, I walked out of the New York Antiquarian Book Fair victorious with a rare surviving copy of the 1933 edition, featuring 33 plates. Peppering the striking black-and-white line drawings and several dramatic illustrated lithographs, printed on glazed paper and pasted onto the regularly printed book — the legacy of Arthur Rackham’s innovation, which had revolutionized the business and technology of book art a quarter century earlier with his epoch-making Alice in Wonderland edition.

Clarke’s haunting, terrifying, yet lyrical illustrations become the perfect visual counterpart to Poe’s haunting, terrifying, lyrical prose. Here is a succulent bit from a fable titled “Silence”:

And the man trembled in the solitude; — but the night waned and he sat upon the rock.

Then I went down into the recesses of the morass, and waded far in among the wilderness of the lilies, and called upon the hippopotami which dwelt upon the fens in the recesses of the morass. And the hippopotami heard my call, and came, with the behemoth, unto the foot of the rock, and roared loudly and fearfully beneath the moon. And I lay close within my covert and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude; — but the night waned and he sat upon the rock.

Then I cursed the elements, and a frightful tempest gathered in the heaven where, before, there had been no wind. And the heaven became livid with the violence of the tempest — and the rain beat on the head of the man — and the floods of the river came down — and the river was tormented into foam — and the water-lilies shrieked within their beds — and the trees crumbled before the wind — and the lightning flashed and the thunder fell — and the rock rocked to its foundation. And I lay close within my covert and I observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled within the solitude; — but the night waned and he sat upon the rock.

Complement with Clarke’s arresting illustrations for Goethe’s Faust, then revisit other visionary artists’ takes on literary classics: Arthur Rackham’s transcendent illustrations for The Tempest and the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, Margaret C. Cook’s sensual paintings for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Ralph Steadman’s illustrations for Orwell’s Animal Farm, Aubrey Beardsley’s gender-defying illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome, and Salvador Dalí’s paintings for Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and the essays of Montaigne.