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‘DO NOT hunt for subjects, let them choose you, not you them,’ wrote Samuel Butler in the Notebooks. ‘Only do that which insists upon being done and runs right up against you, hitting you in the eye until you do it. This calls you and you had better attend to it, and do it as well as you can.’

I cannot pretend that in writing biographies I have always followed Butler’s rule. But it has happened like that more often than not. And certainly the subject of Arthur Rackham did ‘run right up against me’ and ‘insist upon being done’. I can even remember the day when it began to ‘hit me in the eye’. I was looking through a copy of Who’s Who of 1938, and I had savoured once again my favourite entry — that of a certain potentate who is recorded as being ‘an excellent horseman; a brilliant polo player; an excellent shot, and A.1 billiard player’ — when, turning over a few pages, I came to ‘Rackham, Arthur, R. W. S.’

There was nothing in the least egotistical about Arthur Rackham’s modest entry in Who’s Who, but the long list of books that he had illustrated served to remind me of my own childhood and of the great pleasure his work had given to me and to so many others, and it led me to wonder whether anything in the nature of a memorial volume existed. I found that it did not; and this book, which will be