As I’ve done every New Year’s Eve for the past 10 years, I’ll wish all Lines and Colors readers a Happy New Year with a few more of J.C. Leyendecker’s terrific New Year’s babies.

These are from a three decade run of The Saturday Evening Post covers from the early 20th century. For more, see my previous links, below.

I hope your crystal ball reveals a new year filled with art and inspiration!

East of the Sun and West of the Moon is a classic Norwegian book of fairy tales, most famously illustrated in a 1914 edition by the superb Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen.

Taschen has just published a new deluxe, slipcased edition of the book. I haven’t personally seen it yet, but judging from other Taschen volumes, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this one. They always manage to produce inexpensive art volumes with high production values.

There are some preview images on the Taschen page for the book, on the Amazon listing and on Wink.

The images above aren’t indicative of the quality of the new edition, they are simply from existing internet resources taken from previous editions.

There is a Project Gutenberg entry for the original edition with the images in context (in the HTML version, click on them for larger images).

Wikipedia has a page devoted to the original book, with most of Nielsen’s color plates. There are more, as well as some of the black and white illustrations on Wikimedia Commons.

None of these, however, will be as high in quality or detail as the reproductions of the illustrations in the Taschen volume.

For more, see my previous post on Kay Niesen.

[Via BoingBoing]