Creature Collections: Hidden Worlds

         Most of the Creature Collections I’ve featured over the years take the form of encyclopedias or field guides, listing a range of fantastical creatures said to be found in our world.  (If you’d like to see all the Creature Collections so far, look in the sidebar or here.)  Today I’m highlighting some books that play with the conceit of discovering different worlds of creatures.  Each of these books has actually been mentioned before in this blog, but I thought they deserved to be pulled together under the Creature Collections category.

        The Land of Neverbelieve, by Norman Messenger - This lavish book is the record of a visit to a mysterious island and the strange things seen there.  The watercolor and colored pencil illustrations are dreamlike, and the pages fold out to give even more room for pictures.  There is no story or apparent order to the information gathered here and Messenger's imagination has wandered freely, so there's a lot to look at.  Back when she was much younger my daughter T especially liked all the funny trees with their surreal shapes and produce.  I featured a few of these plants in my series of posts on the Botany of the Realms of Imagination: giant curly ferns, umbrella palms, and spaghetti trees.

However there are plenty of creatures in this book, as well!

Amarant, by Una Woodruff - This one reproduces the sketches and watercolors of a seventeenth century noblewoman whose travels brought her to the mysterious island of Amarantos, which was once known as Atlantis.  As a botanist, our artist was focussing her observations on plants, but the book finds its place among my creature collections because so many of the plants of Amarantos happen to be plant-animals hybrids with insects, birds, all kinds of other creatures, and even dragons.  This makes a fun coffee table book, excellent simply for admiring the pictures, however it dates back to 1981 and is no longer readily available.  I was lucky to find a used copy.  In past posts you can see the flower of immortality and a couple of insect-plants, as well as the Dragon Vine and Dillcorn.

        Codex Seraphinianus, by Luigi Serafini - This one is a little different in that it includes no story whatsoever, and all the text is written in an imaginary alphabet of some sort.  One chapter is on plants and you can see spreads of those illustrations here and here, but there are also chapters on machines and vehicles, cultural items, architecture, and of course creatures.  It’s another one that’s best for browsing through, and it’s beautiful, surreal, very weird, and definitely an oddity.  (Also first published in 1981, so clearly there was something in the air that year.)

        Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time, by James Gurney - The creatures in this book (followed by a series of books and other media) are not fantasy per se, since dinosaurs did of course actually exist.  But this is a fantasy version of dinosaurs, in which they have survived and evolved in intelligence but not form, and now are living in a collaborative society with humans.  As with the other books in today’s post, it’s the beauty of the illustrations that provides the appeal.  Like the others it’s in the form of an explorer’s notebook recording all the amazing things he discovers, and the magic of the book is in inviting us to immerse ourselves in the gorgeous pictures of wondrous things.  You can see mention of Dinotopia along with some

illustrations of these magical dinosaurs in a Steep Street, a Skybax rider, and Treetown.

        This is exactly the sort of book I was constantly devising in my childhood, with maps and short explanations, along with pictures of people, buildings, landscapes, and plenty of fantastical creatures.  Of course, my little booklets were neither as comprehensive nor as expertly illustrated as these!  If you’re in the mood for a strange and wondrous armchair journey, I recommend a look at any of these books, if you can find them.

[Pictures: Of Marsh and Stream, illustration by Norman Messenger from The Land of Neverbelieve, 2012;

Unicorn bird, illustration by Una Woodruff from Amarant, 1981;

Illustration by Luigi Serafini from Codex Seraphinianus, 1981;

Skybax Rider over Dinotopia, painting by James Gurney, c 1992 (Image from Heritage Auctions).]