A Bestiary - illustrated by Alexander Calder

Published by Pantheon Books, New York :1993, hardcover, illustrated, 75 pages ( quality art paperstock), 24 cms x 31 cms, condition: as new.

An anthology of poetry, prose and some drama in which all the selections feature an animal. The range of the excerpted pieces is as various as the animals the frog and the halcyon, the elephant and the centaur, the fly and the fish and many more. "A Bestiary" was first published in the US in 1955 in a limited edition. Contributors include Blake, Bunyan, Clare, Benjamin Disraeli, Kafka, Kipling on the ape, T.E. Lawrence on the camel, Milton on the serpent, Pepys, Sterne on the fly from "Tristram Shandy", Tennyson and Gilbert White. Among the Americans are Elizabeth Bishop, William Faulkner, Herman Melville, Marianne Moore and Walt Whitman. There are also contributions from Homer, Pliny and Plutarch, Aesop, Grimm and Darwin.

                                                                                                               Illustrated by Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobiles (kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents) that embrace chance in their aesthetic, his static "stabiles", and his monumental public sculptures. Calder preferred not to analyze his work, saying, "Theories may be all very well for the artist himself, but they shouldn't be broadcast to other people."