The success of Larkin’s Gnomes, Faeries and Giants spawned a market for many similar books, all using white covers and dust jackets to stealthily signify their thematic similarity. The earliest that I know of is The Flight of Dragons (1979), written by Peter Dickinson and illustrated by Wayne Anderson (previously seen on Monday!).   

The book is a cheeky bit of pseudo-science, insisting that dragons did, indeed, exist and then going at lengths to provide evolutionary explanations for flight, fire breathing and the lack of a fossil record. Dickson solves all three by hypothesizing that the wings were for navigation rather than propulsion and that instead dragon flight was, well, he argued dragons were basically blimps, their big abdomens producing large amounts of hydrogen by dissolving excess bone with hydrochloric acid. Breathing fire was a method of off-gassing. There are no fossils because the acid dissolved the bones once the creature died. This is very silly, but described at length and with a straight-face for so many pages that I can’t help but be impressed. Even better, the whole thing was apparently inspired by Pauline Ellison’s cover art for Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy.

Anderson’s art is whimsical, but grounded with a richly dark and earthy palette. Some of his work with its strange proportions and mix of emotional touchstones, particularly that knight on horseback, seem like a sort of proto-Warhammer aesthetic. Love that sphinx, too.