Ink & Blood, a Book of Drawings by Arthur Szyk, with a Prefatory Text by Struthers Burt. New York: Heritage Press, 1946. Seventy-Four color and black and white plates. Full black leather. Decorative matching slipcase. Very Good condition.
$ 2500

LIMITED EDITION, Signed by Arthur Szyk. Frontispiece shows tipped-in Szyk self-portrait at his desk creating Nazi caricatures, and trashing some of them in a garbage can. Most of the cartoons, lampooning the Nazis and Japanese, were drawn by Szyk during the war and with the hope that they would be published in a single volume giving voice and expression to the ugly face of war. While they were published in newspapers and magazines, they did not appear in book format until 1946, when Ink & Blood was dedicated as a Peace Book and not as a War Book. The images remind us of the hideousness and horror of war, the inner face of tyranny, of injustice and intolerance and how much more difficult is the Peace than the War. Szyk, the leading political caricaturist of World War Two, was a hater of hate—Ink & Blood is his personal response to the German phrase "Blood & Iron."