LEGENDARY CREATURES

A gallery of strange creatures of lore, from dragons to eaters of gold and dreams.

Capped by a sinuous dragon on a double gatefold, Auerbach’s translucently hued figures are more graceful than fearsome, but the chimerical ones—particularly the scorpion-tailed Girtablilu people drawn from the epic of Gilgamesh and the Mahabharata’s Navagunjara, made up of parts of nine creatures—are appealingly bizarre. His 20 alphabetized selections, which span the globe, include unicorns, griffins, the golem, merfolk of several varieties, a benign nightmare eater from Japan, a Chilean bird that consumes precious metals, the wildlife-protecting Mimi of Arnhem Land, and Te Ika-a-Māui, a truly large fish that became New Zealand’s entire North Island. The visuals have to carry the load here, however, since despite appending brief references to older sources of information about each entry in a closing section, all that he offers to accompany the pictures are a few perfunctory descriptive notes or explicated legends drawn, to judge from the booklist at the end, from secondary sources. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

More eye candy than reference tool, but young monster hunters may find some fresh quarry.