Illustrated half title for Lyser, Abendlandsiche Tausend und Eine Nacht (v.1 Cotsen 30170).

The fairy tale illustrations of Johann Peter Lyser (1804-1870) were praised by the probing  German-Jewish media theorist and cultural critic Walter Benjamin in his essay “Old Children’s Books” published  in the Illustrierte Zeitung in 1924 (Lyser is also famous for his sketches of composers Beethoven, Mendelsohn, and Schumann.)  Benjamin had this to say about the illustrations of the  Abendländische Tausend und Eine Nacht [Thousand and One Nights of the West].

The cheap sensationalism that forms the background against which this original art developed can be seen most strikingly in the many volumes of Thousand and One Nights of the West with its original lithographs.  This is an opportunistic hodgepodge of fairy tale, saga, legend, and horror story, which was assembled from dubious sources and published in Meissen in the 1830s by F. W. Goedsche (Translation by Rodney Livingstone).

Benjamin didn’t single out any of the plates for their “cheap sensationalism” but he might have had ones like these three in mind.  The ghost of Hamlet’s father is suitably spectral in his theatrical shroud, but the horrid creatures in the backgrounds of the other two plates are even more eyecatching. Lyser’s vampire in a kilt (it would take too long to explain the Scottish dress) has summoned a most peculiar assortment of birds of ill omen and spirits.  The libertine Don Juan appears on the verge of tumbling off the hillock into the unloving embraces of serpents, skeletons, monkeys, cats, and who will escort him to hell.I wonder how the Abendlandische Tausend und Eine Nacht was received by reviewers…  Nightmarish imaginings like Lyser’s usually get a rise out of critics, some of whom overlook that some children adore being terrified within relatively safe confines of a book.