pick5⭐ for Alan Lee's watercolours & drawings. David Day's text shows initial promise, but lapses into a rather pedestrian digest of stories featuring castles from Western cultural traditions. Still, it's one of my favourite books to browse.
The photo is one of my favourite castles: Chateau Chillon on the Swiss shore of Lake Geneva near Montreux. Byron visited, defaced a pillar in the dungeon & was inspired to write The Prisoner of Chillon about it 🏰
I love this drawing by Alan Lee of the Princess Libane, cursed to sit beneath the sea next to the well she negligently allowed to overflow and drown the land. I can almost see the kelp and the Princess's hair billowing in the current.
The story is summarised in a few sentences, and beyond it being included in the Celtic section of tales, I've never been able to identify the source, the bibliography being sparse and the internet bare of results.
Re-reading an old favourite. That Illustrator, Alan Lee, gets top cover billing is a sure guide that the focus of the book is visual, and it is lovely at that. The book is beautifully made, printed on high-quality paper which is as crisp and glossy as the day I bought it on 10th October 1984, which I know as I was in a bookplate phase at the time. I'm not keen on defacing my books anymore, which is what bookplates feel like for me now.
pickBeautiful book full of Lee's art of castles from various sources of literature and myth. Each section also has stories and history written by David Day
Castles | 
