Icons of the Fantastic: Behind the Scenes

In the Spring 2026 issue of Mythlore, I reviewed the book Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from the Korshak Collection (2025), edited by Amanda T. Zehnder and David M. Brinley. The review is available freely online here. 

The new Summer 2026 issue of The University of Chicago Magazine has a profile of the Korshak alums, father and son, who put together the collection of art. It's kind of a behind-the-scenes peek.  Read the whole article here. 

Here is one of the glorious illustrations from the Collection:

José Segrelles, War of the Worlds, c. 1930. (Unless noted, all images courtesy the Korshak Collection)

 

More on Josef Madlener

I've just posted a new piece at Tolkien Oddments substack. Here is the beginning.  You can read the entire piece freely at this link.

More on Madlener

Last summer, I published a piece in The Journal of Tolkien Research on “Josef Madlener’s ‘Der Berggiest’: Not the Origin of Gandalf.” It is freely available here. My point basically was that it was chronologically impossible for a postcard first printed in 1935 to have influenced The Hobbit, and specifically the character Gandalf, whose origin was in the late 1920s, while the manuscript of the bulk of the tale was in existence by early 1933 for C.S. Lewis to be reading it. After that piece was published I had some interesting correspondence with some people, notably Carl F. Hostetter, who suggested better matchings of Madlener’s titles for the six-postcard series “Gestalten aus Märchen und Sage” (Characters from Stories and Legends) with the illustrations themselves. (I had noted that a few of the titles had “questionable associations.”) ...  

 

Books Dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien During His Lifetime

Okay, I'm experimenting. My post on "Books Dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien During His Lifetime" is freely available at my (new) Tolkien Oddments substack  I think you can link to it here.  For now I have about five ideas for occasional Oddments posts, which should give me enough time to decide whether its a useful venue or whether I like blogging better. I'm not giving up on blogging. Non-Tolkien posts will remain here, as well as some Tolkien stuff. We'll see how it works out!