Ink & Blood. A Book of Drawings
Arthur Szyk. New York, Heritage Press,1946.

14], 18, [3] pp. + 4 color plates and 70 monochrome plates. Also with a color frontispiece depicting Szyk at work. With a prefatory text by Struthers Burt. 12¼x9, original morocco, top edge gilt, spine gilt-lettered; original batik-printed board slipcase. One of 1000 inscribed and signed copies.

This copy inscribed for Byron Nishkian. Important post-Holocaust drawings by Szyk. As Burt wrote in the introduction: “This book…these cartoons, the words that accompany them…have a much deeper purpose than to deride and reveal our recent enemies”…”this is NOT A WAR-BOOK, although most of the cartoons were drawn in the time of war. This is a PEACE-BOOK; a book for the parlous years that follow upon war…”

Ink & Blood. A Book of Drawings.
Szyk, Arthur. New York, Heritage Press, 1946.

Signed limited first edition, one of 1000 inscribed copies, of this striking collection of Szyk’s wartime propaganda work, with color frontispiece and 74 plates, six in color and mounted (the rest printed in sepia duotone), inscribed, “In memory of Ronnie Gaskin, Arthur Szyk.”

Polish-born Arthur Szyk considered his work to be “weapons of war.” Upon the German invasion of Poland in 1939, his life and career were altered forever. Syzk lived in London at the time, and, in an effort to sway American public opinion against the Nazis, British authorities dispatched him to New York City. There he was to assume the role of unofficial propagandist for the Allied powers, contributing a steady stream of anti-Nazi cartoons and caricatures for major U.S. publications, including Time, Collier’s, Esquire, The New York Times, the New York Post (where he eventually served as editorial cartoonist) and the Chicago Sun. For this mission, Szyk developed a new and different approach from his established style of “illumination,” creating caricatures that combined the precise detail and fine craftsmanship of his miniaturist illustrations with the barbed satire of political commentary.