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Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from the Korshak Collection not only provides a beautiful addition to any fantasy art lover’s bookshelf, but also insightful perspectives on the pieces contained and collecting as a discipline.

As befits a text on a collection of art, images fill the pages, starting with Edmund Dulac’s Snow Queen on the cover. Amanda T. Zehnder discusses in part of her standout essay how the figure of the Snow Queen can barely be seen from far away. This visual effect thus makes the image an ideal choice for the cover. The book concludes, meanwhile, with the Illustrated Checklist of the Full Korshak Collection. In addition to being an amusing reference to The Checklist of Fantastic Literature, I can see this being very useful. The images in this Checklist are small, with many on one page, which makes it very easy to find the specific image you seek. Within the main text, the contributors do also include images from outside the collection to support their points, another aid to the reader.

Icons of the Fantastic has a generally academic viewpoint, as you might have gathered from my notes about ability to reference and contributors’ citations. David M. Brinley even explicitly states reviving and furthering scholarship as one of the aims of the text. Different contributors also make references to notebooks, sketches, and Bok masks in the Korshak Collection, not included in this tightly-focused book, lighting up the potential for even further scholarship.

Please do not let that put you off the book if you come from a hobbyist perspective, however. I do not think anyone reading my reviews will be put off by any of the writing of the individual essays. As long as you have a basic grounding and interest in fantasy art, you will be fine. Familiarity with particularly famous artists like Frank Frazetta and Brian Froud does make the book easier to read. By the way, I use the term fantasy art in this article to mirror Stephen D. Korshak’s usage of fantasy illustration in discussing the collection.

And even if you do find some of the essays inscrutable, the book would be worth the price with just the images and supplementary text. Guillermo del Toro’s foreword, in particular, provides a compelling perspective on the collector’s role in society. This pairs excellently with Stephen D. Korshak’s own perspective on developing the collection. The Korshak Collection has a very clearly defined set of principles, and it’s a rare opportunity to see such principles so clearly explained by the original collector.