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NDER the shadow of the opening of the Second World War, Rackham’s death received less attention in the Press than it would have done at another time. The obituary notice in The Times described him as ‘one of the most eminent book illustrators of his day’ with ‘a special place in the hearts of children’, and contrasted his belief in ‘the sacrosanct quality of the text’ with an ‘unmistakable personal idiosyncrasy’. ‘His genius had something of the Gothic flavour … his line was in the last degree sensitive.’

In December 1939, the memorial exhibition at the Leicester Galleries brought together examples of Rackham’s finest work from his best period, together with several of his landscapes and the majority of the principal drawings for Poe’s Tales, Peer Gynt, and The Wind in the Willows. The writer of the introductory note in the catalogue was excusably a partisan. He removed the guarded qualification of The Times’ obituarist and made no bones about describing Arthur Rackham as ‘the most eminent book illustrator of his day’.

The Wind in the Willows, with Rackham’s last illustrations, was published in New York by the Limited Editions Club in 1940. On this volume Bruce Rogers, greatest of American book designers, lavished all his skill. The drawings were not generally known in