We'll Miss You, Pauline Baynes

I can’t believe that I only found out today that illustrator Pauline Baynes died a month ago.

But it’s fitting, with my current re-reading of the Narnia books, that I should find this out today.

Baynes didn’t only illustrate Narnia, of course. She was a favoured illustrator of Tolkien’s work and her illustrations appear on nearly every Puffin children’s fantasy book produced in the 1970s, as in this edition of one of Mary Norton’s later Borrower books:

Or this one of George Macdonald’s lovely The Princess and Curdie, the sequel to The Princess and the Goblin:

I actively seek out editions with Pauline Baynes illustrations, so central is she to the ideas about what fantasy should look like that I absorbed in my childhood.

But she is best known, perhaps, for her Narnia work. I know I’ve been carrying around these full-colour images from a commemorative calendar since about 1991.

We’ll miss you, Pauline Baynes.