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Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates

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FOREWORD

PIRATES, Buccaneers, Marooners, those cruel but picturesque sea
wolves who once infested the Spanish Main, all live in present-day
conceptions in great degree as drawn by the pen and pencil
of Howard Pyle.

Pyle, artist-author, living in the latter half of the nineteenth
century and the first decade of the twentieth, had the fine
faculty of transposing himself into any chosen period of history
and making its people flesh and blood again--not just historical
puppets. His characters were sketched with both words and
picture; with both words and picture he ranks as a master, with a
rich personality which makes his work individual and attractive
in either medium.

He was one of the founders of present-day American illustration,
and his pupils and grand-pupils pervade that field to-day. While
he bore no such important part in the world of letters, his
stories are modern in treatment, and yet widely read. His range
included historical treatises concerning his favorite Pirates
(Quaker though he was); fiction, with the same Pirates as
principals; Americanized version of Old World fairy tales; boy
stories of the Middle Ages, still best sellers to growing lads;
stories of the occult, such as In Tenebras and To the Soil of the
Earth, which, if newly published, would be hailed as
contributions to our latest cult.

In all these fields Pyle's work may be equaled, surpassed, save
in one. It is improbable that anyone else will ever bring his
combination of interest and talent to the depiction of these
old-time Pirates, any more than there could be a second Remington
to paint the now extinct Indians and gun-fighters of the Great West.

Important and interesting to the student of history, the
adventure-lover, and the artist, as they are, these Pirate
stories and pictures have been scattered through many magazines
and books. Here, in this volume, they are gathered together for
the first time, perhaps not just as Mr. Pyle would have done, but
with a completeness and appreciation of the real value of the
material which the author's modesty might not have permitted.

MERLE JOHNSON.

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