Some Summa
Fabled Lands: Fables, Nonsense & Other True Stories
by Ray Ching
Poorly Rabbit Press, Auckland 2021
MICHAEL DUNN
The first thing to note about Ray Ching’s Fabled Lands is its huge size. Undoubtedly it is the biggest and heaviest (4.4 kilos) tome I have ever been asked to review. Its page dimensions are an impressive 330 x 280 mm and its thickness 60 mm. You need a lectern to read it as it is too big and heavy to peruse in comfort. Issued in a limited edition of 150 copies it is a vanity publication that showcases Ray Ching’s art in a lavish, almost overwhelming way. We find page after page of large reproductions of artworks, of handwritten text, of details, of sketches and ephemera. There is a lot to see and a lot to read. Ching himself appears as the main creator of this enterprise as no other author or editor is credited. This only adds to the book’s singular, obsessive and eccentric character.
On the, a publication that was a runaway success and remains in print. Unsurprisingly illustration is a word that comes to mind as we leaf through the many pages of . It seems like a nostalgic summa of his life’s work and of his sources of inspiration in varied texts such as Aesop’s Fables, fairy tales and the journals of early explorers and their encounters with then unknown and exotic species. It includes vast and diverse transcriptions from a range of authors interspersed with Ching’s own autobiographical reminiscences.
