Here’s the opening illustration by Barnett Freeman for Walter de la Mare’s 1939 British anthology Behold, this dreamer: of reverie, night, sleep, dream, love-dreams, nightmare, death, the unconscious, the imagination, divination, the artist, and kindred subjects.

The book contains de la Mare’s perceptive introduction and what are effectively a long set of mini-essays, followed by the master anthologist’s judicious mix of selected poetry, prose and other texts. It’s deemed perhaps the best of his five anthologies, and is currently free on Archive.org via one of those basic Public Library of India scans. These scans, while welcome as readable freebies of post-1923 long-out-of-print works, regrettably all use such harsh contrast that they ruin any artwork or photography in a book.

Spine art…

1984 British paperback reprint cover by what might be another artist mimicking the style of the original art…