posted on 25 Jul 2022

The Complete Edition of Andersen & Grimm, illustrated by Joyce Mercer

I think I should start with a point of clarification: this isn’t a complete collection of all things Andersen and Grimm but something a little more modest - a bringing together of the tales which had been illustrated before by Joyce Mercer but published in separate volumes.

So, with that out of the way, who, you might want to know is Joyce Mercer? Well, as has happened before when it comes to researching some of these older and less well-known illustrators, I’m not exactly drowning in details of her life and work. The internet has plenty of examples of her books for sale but not much by way of biographical detail and so I went to The Dictionary of 20th Century British Book Illustrators who had this to say:

“Mercer, Amy Joyce  (1896 -1965)

Born in Sheffield, Mercer studied at Sheffield School of Art and Chelsea School of Art. She became a book illustrator and postcard designer, and contributed cartoons to several magazines, including Punch. Her illustrations are done in ink or in full colour, and are flat, two-dimensional.”

And that’s it as far as biography is concerned. Talk about being damned with faint praise! The dismissive tone of the assessment of her drawings as ‘flat’ and ‘two-dimensional’ is one of the most unfair reviews of an artist’s work that I’ve seen for a long time. There’s no denying the factual nature of the description but it seems to me to miss the point. 

Take a look at the illustrations and you’ll see immediately that there’s no intent here for the drawings to be realistic or concrete. This is about colour, shape, whimsy and humour - a stylised romanticism that owes something to the Aesthetic movement or to the work of Aubrey Beardsley.

This book came to me with its super-rare dust jacket which is a riot of colour made up from a collage of images taken from a number of stories and which gives the reader only a taste of what’s inside. The 14 or 15 full page colour illustrations are delightful but, actually, what I like most are the small black and white pen illustrations that are liberally scattered throughout.

You really get to see the artist having fun with her subject in these small drawings - these are all about the personality of the person wielding the pen and you know immediately there’s a mischievous spirit that drives some of this.

The full page colour illustrations are the work of a decorative not a representative artist and so the emphasis is on striking colour combinations and shapes. In fact, she reduces many of her figures to not much more than a set of geometric patterns that we, as viewers, are more than happy to accept as signifying a Prince, Princess, fairy, dragon or whatever.

There’s no doubt that books like this with illustrations like this are now vintage collectables for an adult market and that there will be very few children who will ever want to spend time with a book like this. I think that’s a great shame because although there are plenty of super contemporary children’s book illustrators around, I’d like to think there was still a place for someone like Joyce Mercer to delight younger readers with her drawings.

The book in the condition shown in the photographs is, sadly, pretty rare and unless you’re dead lucky like I was on this occasion, you’re going to have to dig very deep into your pockets to afford one.

 

Terry Potter

July 2022