Rabelais Rousers
(2024, 160 pages with dozens in colour or sepia, $19.99, 6 inches wide by 8.75 inches high)

Reading François Rabelais's sixteenth-century masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel is like riding on a roller-coaster. The five volumes begin with the birth of Gargantua, an enormous child who becomes a colossal giant (hence the word "gargantuan"), and proceed to introduce his similarly gigantic son Pantagruel. This is a bawdy, imaginative, rude and exhilarating exercise - and a real challenge to illustrate. In the 1880s, French artist Albert Robida took on that challenge in two huge volumes and created some breathtakingly wonderful images, the best of which are crammed into this book, with snippets from Rabelais to make sense of it all (or nonsense, as the case may be). It's a lot of fun, from the nymphs and satyrs to the giant wooden pig modelled on the Trojan horse.

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