A front matter woodcut by Spanish illustrator Enrique-Cristofol Ricart to the 1933 Limited Editions volume of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote. The iconography of this edition is particularly striking to me aesthetically, but this particular one is the standout for its idea: though Quixote and Sancho Panza remain silhouettes behind the figure of Cervantes, they are the only truly solid, looming figures we see; the author, at his desk in his imprisonment, writes while shackled to them in ghostly form—as he has been to us through the ages, the cipher we know so little who gave us the first great Western novel we know so well.
