Elinore Blaisdell
(b. Brooklyn , New York ,
15 October 1900; d. Lancaster ,
Pennsylvania
American artist and prolific illustrator of books. Born in Brooklyn, New York, on 15 October 1900
(not 1904, as appears in reference books), Blaisdell studied at the Art
Students League and Naum M. Los School of Art, New York, in addition to the Slade
School of Fine Art in London. In 1928
she married Melrich [“Mike”] Vonelm Rosenberg (1905-1937), an author and
publisher’s representative. Blaisdell
illustrated some of her husband’s books, including a biography Eleanor of Aquitaine (1937), and With Sword and Song (1937), the tale of
a fifteen-year-old boy in medieval France . Rosenberg died of a heart attack at age 32.
The couple had no children, and Blaisdell, who always used her own name
professionally, never remarried.
Blaisdell
edited and illustrated one anthology for which she merits special consideration
here. Tales of the Undead: Vampires and Visitants (New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell, 1947) qualifies as the precursor to the familiar modern themed
anthologies of vampire stories. Though its contents are not solely vampire
stories (it includes stories of other types of the undead, defined as “the
unearthly being which is neither ghost nor living”), they are in the
majority. Classics like Le Fanu’s
“Carmilla,” Gautier’s “Clarimonde,” and F. Marion Crawford’s “For the Blood Is
the Life,” appear along with more recent tales, many from pulp magazines like Weird Tales, by authors such as H.P.
Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Seabury Quinn, and Robert Bloch. Each of the twenty-three selections has an
illustration by Blaisdell.
According
to the dust-wrapper blurb, Blaisdell had become a devoted reader of
supernatural stories at the age of seven, when she discovered Poe, Hawthorne,
and Maupassant in her father’s library.
She read “several thousand stories in all and selected each in this
collection for its particular appeal and excellence.”
NB: An
earlier version of this entry appeared in my column “Notes on Neglected
Fantasists”, Fastitocalon no. 1
(2010).
