Last but certainly not least this week is Fabulous Beasts and Demons (1975), by art historian Heinz Mode. This is a scholarly monster book, which honestly, I usually find scholarly appraisals of monsters rather dull. But not this one! Mode has a heck of a hook. He’s utterly uninterested in every aspect of monsters aside from their artistic representation, and the how and why those representations change over the centuries. He doesn’t care about belief, or cases of mistaken identity or stories or bizarre etymological permutations or credulity-straining rationalizations. He wants to talk about monster pictures, and that is all he talks about.

He has five taxons: Monsters with a human body or posture, monsters with an animal body but a human head, monsters made of parts of many animals, monsters that only diverge slightly from real creatures (the unicorn with its horn, the cyclops with only one eye) and, finally, the strangest category, which Mode defines as “Man-made Objects and Natural Phenomena in the Shape of Living Beings.” This last category includes the sword- or knife-man which appears in South Asian art. Chronology is important here. Mode tries to find the earliest examples and then attempt to square them with the most recent.

I find this particularly interesting considering that only a portion of monsters really have important folklore surrounding them. Many exists only as heraldic or decorative art, so decoupling the story-monsters from the stories often fills missing links in the evolution of these creatures that aren’t otherwise immediately apparent. But what does it mean? Mode doesn’t say. His evolutionary timeline is compelling and really difficult to dispute, but I find it vexing that Mode is content to catalog and never offer conclusions. Especially when pretty good ones are sitting right there, if only he’d indulge in a teensy bit of hypothesizing. I suppose that isn’t the scholar’s way.

As you might expect, the book is filled to the gills with art, photographs and reproduction drawings, many of rare and unusual figures.