Dreaming Eyes: A Collector's Guide to Frederick Duncan

By Norman I. Platnick

Enchantment Ink is pleased to introduce the 19th volume in our series of full-color guides to American illustrators, "Dreaming Eyes: A Collector's Guide to Frederick Duncan," by Norman I. Platnick. Fifteen years in the making, this new volume attempts to bring together everything known about Frederick Alexander Duncan's printed works, including full-color images of all his known magazine covers, ads, catalogs, blotters, postcards, advertising cards, sheet music, fans, posters, pocket mirrors, and especially his many candy boxes and calendar prints. The volume includes almost 500 images on 95 8.5x11 inch, velo-bound pages, with biographical information and a detailed index/size & price guide.

Click here to download this guide, for free.

A note from William Platnick

Hello Enchantment Ink visitor. On April 8th, 2020, the author of all these books, my father, Norman Platnick, died of complications due to a serious fall.

Words cannot describe the amount of pain my family is in right now. My father was a wonderful, humble, loving, passionate and intelligent man. He had 3 passions in life: my mother, spiders and collecting.

As a way of honoring my father's legacy in the illustrated artwork community, I will be turning as many books of his as possible into PDF files and distributing them online, for free.

If you have found these collector's guides useful, I ask that you make a donation to the Norman I. Platnick Memorial Fund, which will be setting up a scholarship in the field of arachnology, my father's career.

If you'd like to learn more about my father and his amazing life (such as skipping middle school and high school and going to college when he was 12), I'd like to lift up just a few pieces:

NY Times: Norman Platnick Obituary
Concord University Magazine Fall 2018: Friendly Neighbordhood Arachnologist page 20
NY Times: The Exciting Adventures of Spider Man
Daily News: NYC'S real-life spider man
NY Times: For Some, an Appliance; for Others, Art
The Wall Street Journal: Warming Up to Spiders

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