Among the over 400 illustrations herein are rare photographs and self-portraits of Blaine and, especially interesting, dozens of published and unpublished drawings and paintings that reveal a side of the artist previously unknown and unseen. The book includes a complete bibliography of published work and a biography that emphasizes the professional side of Blaine. The author Roland Trenary has been collecting and researching the artist for almost 40 years, amassing the most comprehensive assemblage of information and artwork that one might imagine, given the elusive nature of the subject. His personal life is obfuscated by a combination of time's grime and his own desire for privacy and outlandish cover stories. His best book productions feature twenty to a hundred illustrations each, and he garnered several awards for design and illustration. With everything from children's classic tales to cookbooks to treatises on witchcraft to mainstream fiction to literature (including Steinbeck, Hemingway and Voltaire), the publishing industry relied on Mahlon Blaine often. He painted, but he is best known for pen and ink – an uncanny artistic master of Erotica and Exotica who lived for decades in cheap hotels and borrowed rooms, acutely observing humanity while wielding pens and brushes dipped in wit and wry. In two thousand drawings published between 19, illustrator Mahlon Blaine revealed his subjects – from Demons to Deities, Maylasians to Martians, Biology to Biography, Lasciviousness to Literature.
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