As a child, Stephen D. Korshak fought martians alongside John Carter. A painting by J. Allen St. John for the 1941 novella The City of Mummies, from the John Carter of Mars series, hung in Korshak’s bedroom, and he used to imagine himself taking part in the depicted battle. “I immersed myself into that scene, and it gave me this fantastic sense of wonder,” says Korshak, LAB’69, AB’74 (Class of 1973).

From that painting, published on the cover of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories, grew one of the most significant collections of fantastic art in the world. The subject of the book Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from the Korshak Collection (University of Delaware Press, 2025), it is a record of how artists have envisioned scenes from science fiction, horror, and fantasy literature over the past 160 years. While collecting has become an undeniably serious pursuit for Korshak, his sense of wonder has never left him.

His love of the fantastic runs deep. His father, Erle Korshak, EX’47, founded Shasta Publishers, which specialized in science fiction and fantasy. Based in Hyde Park, Shasta published books by authors including Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and John W. Campbell, whose novella Who Goes There? (1938) inspired the films The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Thing (1982). Shasta’s first publication, the reference book The Checklist of Fantastic Literature: A Bibliography of Fantasy, Weird, and Science Fiction Books Published in the English Language (1948), helped codify the genre of fantastic literature. Such literature had gained in popularity in the United States since the 1920s, thanks in large part to new pulp magazines dedicated to science fiction and fantasy.

Or should we say “scientifiction”? That’s how Hugo Gernsback, the editor of Amazing Stories, introduced readers to the genre in April 1926: “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” Amazing Stories, the first English-language pulp magazine dedicated to science fiction, and the many pulps that followed in its footsteps, reprinted these classics alongside experimental writing by up-and-coming authors such as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke.

It’s no surprise that growing up in this world, Stephen Korshak developed a strong imagination and creative bent. But his identity as a collector, he says, had its origins in his identity as “a frustrated artist.” He practiced magic in his youth, took a year off from the College to try his hand at avant-garde filmmaking, and, after graduating from law school, pursued legal work in the creative arts. But none of these proved to be quite the right creative outlet.

Then one day he decided to root around in the facility where Shasta cover artwork was stored. These long-hidden gems again caught his fancy; he was particularly drawn to the bright surrealist works of frequent Shasta illustrator Hannes Bok. “I was reminded of the luminous work of Hannes Bok that appeared on Shasta’s covers that had so strongly influenced me when I was growing up. That rediscovery awakened a desire to share this art with others,” he wrote in an email. He realized that collecting could be a creative act in itself.

Korshak honed his approach over the years. An organizing principle, he says, is what separates amassing from collecting. So he chose to focus on pieces made to accompany literary works—a natural consequence of his Shasta heritage as well as a testament to his love of reading. Furthermore, to document the history of imaginative illustration, Korshak set his sights on what he deemed the most iconic works from the most dominant artists of each era of 20th-century American fantastic publishing. Over time he placed these works within the broader context of imaginative illustration, adding creations by European artists who helped define illustrative art in their home countries and influenced illustrators around the world.

As the collection evolved, Korshak came to believe that the distinctions often made between fine artists and illustrators, and between those who worked for the “slicks”—prestige magazines like Harper’s Magazine and Collier’s—and the pulps were arbitrary. Many of the pulp artists were formally trained, and most looked to the same fine artists and the artistic trends of the day for inspiration.

“For a long time, many people naively dismissed these spectacular visions of space, fairyland, and the future as simply throwaway commissions produced by harried freelancers working with scratchboards and other cheap materials,” writes Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic Michael Dirda in his introduction to Icons of the Fantastic. “Yet, commercial origins don’t preclude the creation of things of beauty.”

There’s a quote from Albert Einstein that Korshak likes: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science.” Korshak says, “When I see these paintings, I have that immersion, I have that sense of mystery about the universe, and it motivates me.”

Arthur Rackham, The Mock Turtle (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), 1907, watercolor, pen-and-ink on paper, 10 ½ × 7 in.

During the first decade of the 20th century, publishers began inserting full-color plates into gift books, lavishly illustrated volumes marketed as holiday gifts for children. Rackham, who had worked primarily in black-and-white line drawings earlier in his career, was one of the first illustrators to find his groove with this new technology. Two years before he illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Rackham had found real fame with 51 full-color illustrations he made to accompany Rip Van Winkle—an average of one illustration for every 100 words of Washington Irving’s story.

Edmund Dulac, The Snow Queen, 1910, watercolor, gouache, pen-and-ink on paper, 12 ⅜ × 10 in.

Once a renowned illustrator visited Korshak’s home and kept excusing himself to go to the bathroom. When Korshak gently asked if he was feeling all right, the illustrator admitted that he had been making an excuse to go look at Edmund Dulac’s The Tempest “Full Fathom Five,” which hung near the Korshaks’ bathroom. Dulac’s tonal watercolors do draw viewers in for a closer look. In The Snow Queen, from a gift book of Hans Christian Andersen tales, the title character emerges through shades of blue and light dabs of color: “You can miss her the first time. It’s so subtle,” says Korshak. Dulac illustrated gift books for a rival of Rackham’s publisher. Unlike Rackham, who brought his background in line drawings to his work in gift books, Dulac set himself apart through his mastery of new full-color printing technology—especially his use of small areas of light colors against a dark background to highlight an image.

J. Allen St. John, The Eternal Lover, 1925, oil on canvas board, 25 × 18 in.

If you ask Korshak which pieces from his collection he would save in a fire, he’ll demur. It’s like asking which of his children he would save, he says. “They’re all my children. I love them all.” But he doesn’t hesitate for long: J. Allen St. John’s work changed his life. The City of Mummies painting that hung in his childhood bedroom and the cover art for The Eternal Lover are both clear favorites. “St. John was the first person to start up what we would call heroic fantasy, and it was perfect for Burroughs.” St. John illustrated numerous Edgar Rice Burroughs works, including the Tarzan books, creating an iconic look that has continued to define the character a century later. Characteristic of his style is a sharp focus in the center of the illustration, with a softer background. In The Eternal Lover, the battle with a saber-toothed tiger appears to take place in midair as a result: “It’s almost like this whole heroic scene is elevated,” says Korshak. “There’s something majestic about it.”

Harry Clarke, The Pit and the Pendulum, 1919, pen-and-ink on paper, 9 × 7 in.

“If you were to Google ‘Pit and the Pendulum, Wikipedia,’” says Korshak, Harry Clarke’s illustration would show up. “Not because I put it there,” he’s quick to clarify. “It’s fans who put it there.” Many artists have interpreted Edgar Allan Poe’s work, but for Korshak, Harry Clarke’s drawings capture something special about the author’s dark tales. “There’s something about the way Clarke does everything,” says Korshak. He combines subtle detail with planes of a single color—a technique Clarke imported from his work making stained glass—to emphasize the elongated central figure, the pendulum, and the wisps of smoke. “The horror is not gratuitous and bloody, it’s more intellectual.”

José Segrelles, War of the Worlds, c. 1930, mixed media on paper, 11 × 16 in. (at top)

“Segrelles is important not only because he is one of the greatest illustrators of all time, ... but also because he had a profound influence on so many other illustrators,” says Korshak. Even the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (a fellow collector who wrote the foreword to Icons of the Fantastic) drew inspiration from José Segrelles when designing the faun in Pan’s Labyrinth. And indeed there’s a cinematic quality to Segrelles’s use of light and shadow, a product of his time applying color to film reels at a film studio. Korshak emphasizes the careful arrangement of elements in this War of the Worlds illustration in particular—the twisted tree, the bolts of electricity, the approaching martians in the background. At UChicago, Korshak says, he remembers discussing the idea of a unified whole, “that you can’t take one thing away from it without diminishing it. It’s just a whole. And that’s the way Segrelles’s work is.”

Frank R. Paul, Life on Neptune, 1940, gouache on illustration board, 14 × 11 in.

After the moon landing in 1969, when asked how NASA knew the mission could succeed, one of its engineers reportedly said: because Frank R. Paul had already visualized it. Whether or not the story is apocryphal, Korshak notes, it captures the influence fantastic artists had on people’s imaginations. Korshak remembers imagining new futures for himself as a Lab student. “At roughly the same period, my classmates and I were learning FORTRAN programming in the basement of Judd Hall during high school. It was a remarkable time when ideas that had once existed only in the imagination of science fiction authors and illustrators were rapidly becoming part of everyday reality.”

Hannes Bok, A Rose for Ecclesiastes, 1963, gouache on illustration board, 11 × 16 in.

“The pulp magazines didn’t pay much, but you had people who were fans, like Virgil Finlay, Hannes Bok, who didn’t care about the money,” says Korshak. “They were there to express themselves.” Bok was heavily influenced by trends in the art world. From Maxfield Parrish, who illustrated covers for publications such as Collier’s and Life, and theorist Jay Hambidge, Bok learned the theory of dynamic symmetry, which guides the elaborate composition of A Rose for Ecclesiastes, a wraparound cover design for Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine. “It gives the feeling of movement, the way things are curved and stylized,” says Korshak.