Contributed by Owen Schumacher
They're cheap, and they're really, really fun.
From 1973 into the late '70s, academic publisher Pendulum Press—sometimes giving printing rights to houses like Starbooks—released their Illustrated Classics, a series of edutainment books intended to introduce school kids to great works of the Western canon. Usually paperback but sometimes hardcover, all of the more than 100 books were art directed by editor and producer Vincent Fago. Students were treated to such classics as Hawthorne's, The House of the Seven Gables [1977], Helen Keller's, The Story of My Life [1974], and the highlight of this article, Dracula [1973] by Bram Stoker.
Many of the books, including the one featured, were illustrated by Fago's friend, Nestor Redondo, an amazing talent from the Philippines, whose credits include DC Comics', Rima the Jungle Girl [1974-1975] and Swamp Thing [1974-1976]. As an interesting side note, he also drew the heavenly DC undertaking, The Bible [1975], a curious, one-off collector's item, as well as the Christian comic, Marx, Lenin, Mao and Christ [1977]. Anyway, Nestor was a genius, and vampirism never looked better!
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