I have opened up a new category, Book Illustrators, as I am having a great time tracking down books with wonderful illustrations that I have enjoyed throughout my life. Most of them are children's books as adult stories are not illustrated and, as Alice said before she popped down the rabbit hole 'what is the use of a book without pictures or conversation' .
One illustrator I always loved for his Gothic and magical drawings and paintings was Arthur Rackham. While Tenniel is the artist one immediately thinks of in connection with Alice in Wonderland, Rackham also produced illustrations that I, personally, feel are more suited to the slightly nightmarish quality of this story.
Rackham was very good on trees and vegetation and somehow made them rather menacing. In his illustrations for Wind in the Willows, particularly the foray into the Wild Wood, you felt that these trees would swoop down and attack you with their branches (as did the Whomping Willow in the Harry Potter books, though that particular tree is not as menacing as any of Rackhams).
Arthur Rackham was one of 12 children and was born in Lambeth in 1867 and lived until 1939. Reading his entry in Wilkipedia does not make for exciting reading. He seems to have been born, grew up, married and had a perfectly normal happy life with no seeming angst or artistic temperament, and yet somehow one feels there must have been an inner person lurking somewhere who produced all these magnificent images.
Of course, for me, a Wagner fan, his illustrations of the Ring Cycle are my favourite. I did not discover these until well into my adulthood and after I had become a Wagner convert. I had borrowed Das Rheingold from my local gramophone library (as they were quaintly called then 
- now they are multimedia centres), in the old LP format which had the bonus that the booklets inside were packed full of information and terrific photos. (CD inserts nowadays are a different thing altogether but that is a blog for another day). Inside this box set was the translation of the German and it was full of the most wonderful images by Arthur Rackham.
These superb colour drawings and paintings captured perfectly the magical, mysterious, incestuous world of Wagner's great epic full of dwarfs, giants, gods, goddesses, norns, and Valkyries.
This is Brunnhilde, the Warrior maiden, daughter of the great god Wotan and his favourite out of his nine children. The Valkyries spent their time galloping around battlefields and collecting the slaughtered soldiers and taking them to Valhalla to live in paradise with them. Not a bad place to end up one might think, though on viewing some productions of the Ring and seeing the Valkyries on display, even a dead hero might think twice about it.
And here are the Rhinemaidens. Now, in most early productions of Das Rheingold, the Rheinmaidens 
were well covered up as modesty demanded. I have seen some photographs of Rheinmaidens dressed in what looks like Victorian bathing costumes and looking incredibly hideous. These ladies were meant to be sexy and seductive, otherwise why would Alberich lust after them? A production at Bayreuth not so long ago actually had a pool on stage with the singers swimming around in body stockings reflected in an angled mirror above so it looked as if they were swimming in the Rhine. The latest Ring at Covent Garden has them totally starkers but, oddly enough, by the time we reach the final opera, Gotterdamerung, they all appeared out of the Rhine fully clothed, for reasons which were never explained. Rackham's pictures caused a bit of a scandal when they were first printed, if you take a look at this picture you can understand why Victorian/Edwardian sensibilities were shaken. To me this is what Rheinmaidens should look like, but very rarely do.
There are hundreds more pictures to be tracked down on various websites. Arthur Rckham illustrated a Midsummer Night's Dream, The Secret Garden and Peter Pan to name but a few. To view these illustrations is to enter a world of enchantment.
