vanquished by ancient texts!

Little did i know that books illustrated by my sacred triumverate of artists :Aurthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, and Kay Neilsen (with Aubrey Beardsley and Harry Clarke hot on their tails) are haute property in the antiquarian book world, but it appears that to even show your face at a dusty book convention you need a white vellum gilt-embossed tome of one of these three. Mykle and I walked in pouring rain through the slightly industrial wasteland south of Market to go to the Antiquarian Book Convention today. We arrived dripping wet and happy and I wiggled our way in for free. I can't even express the amazing books we saw there- booksellers from all over the globe were represented, each with a little booth holding millions of dollars worth of products which would take only about an hour to burn to ash. Ancient maps in Latin, medival miniatures painted and gold-leafed by hand, enourmous original white vellum folios of Peter Pan illusrtated by Rackham and tied with a white satin ribbon, Sylvia Plath's copy of her first book published signed to Ted's parents, First-edition signed copies of everyone you can imagine: Hemingway, Joyce, Tolkien, Bukowski (with drawing), Steinbeck, Miller, etc etc. The kids books were amazing, as I said, mainly bound in white vellum embossed in gold, uncut pages with the rough deckle edge-a thin sheet of tissue covering each illustration. We got to touch things too, wet and rumpled as we were, everyone was super nice, if tweedy and upper class-seeming. I found Black Oak's booth and talked to Carl, my manager. Carl shows me a Visa receipt for $3,500 that someone had dropped on books at one time. This is the duty of the artist and the writer: to give the very rich something to spend their money on, so they will been considered to have good taste!
I decided long ago to become the next Dulac, and bring childrens book illustration to an epoch of glory only rivalled by those men at the turn of the century whose books are being sold right now in a warehouse in San Francisco for $500 a pop!!! Wish me luck in this task! I am first illusrating the Aimee Messer story entitled "The Jar", then on to my own interpretation of my favorite fairy tale: East of the Sun, West of the Moon.