Here’s a weird one: Dover Books’ Treasury of Fantastic and Mythological Creatures, compiled by Richard Huber. This is exactly the sort of book that only exists because Dover’s mission to publish public domain material led to some pretty bizarre projects.

What’s so weird about a Dover clip art book of monsters? Huber basically went through thousands of years of visual art and found 1,087 of the coolest monsters. Didn’t matter if it was an Egyptian bas-relief or a painting by Gustav Klimt. He then painstakingly reproduced each monster in isolation, as a crisp, clean, black and white illustration. He grouped the illustrations into plates organized in roughly chronological and geographic order.

What is the purpose of this book? Aside of monster-obsessed children like me, who was this marketed to? Who has kept it in print since 1980? Why on earth did Huber feel the need to essentially re-draw the work of great masters (for instance, Durer’s Death, lower left on the cover)? How did he manage to process so many disparate artistic styles into his own unified one without diminishing their impact?

I have no answers for you. All I know is that for some reason my parents bought this book at my request when I was still a fairly small boy and I pored over it ceaselessly. I love it because, my god, so many monsters. I love it because it gave me just enough info to use to hunt down more info. And, as an adult, I love it because it is so damn strange.

Edited a little later on to add: I’ve been thinking about Huber all day and tried to dig up something resembling an explanation for this book. The only Richard Huber of note that I can find was a painter in Dachau, Germany, born 1902, died 1982. His paintings are unremarkable impressionistic landscapes, mostly. I have no way to find out for sure, but I like to think that this Treasury was his secret life’s work, completed and published just two years before his death.