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Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights. By Robert Irwin. London: The Arcadian Library in association with Oxford University Press, 2010.
Visions of the Jinn is a beautiful book with a price tag of $225, perhaps more appropriate for the coffee table than the library shelf. It contains 163 illustrations within its 240 pages. However, Irwin's goal is much larger than just pleasing the eye. Recognizing that the impressions of current readers are as much the result of the pictures as of the stories themselves, he identifies his audience as readers of the Arabian Nights who are curious about the illustrations as commentary on the text (10). Along with a brief summary of the history of the various texts and manuscripts, he examines and analyzes the evolution of the images that accompany and complement the stories.
Versions of the Arabian Nights have been in steady publication since Antoine Galland first introduced them to the West at the end of the seventeenth century. Consequently, the books provide an excellent case study for the introduction, production, and incorporation of illustration into printed texts. Irwin points out that the earliest editions of the Arabian Nights were intended for adult audiences and did not include pictures. Initially, the only illustrations were frontispieces, and most of those depicted a scene from the framing story in which the king marries a virgin, only to have her executed the next morning, until Shahrazad volunteers to marry him and then preserves her life by telling stories each night. These pictures made no effort to reflect the setting of the stories. Illustrators drew from material with which they were...