Alan Odle

Alan Elsden Odle (1888–1948) was an English illustrator, remembered today as the husband of the English novelist Dorothy Richardson, whom he married in 1917. His grotesque and subversive style was a precursor of surrealism. He illustrated an English edition of Voltaire's Candide ((G. Routledge, 1922), Mark Twain's 1601: A Tudor Fireside Conversation, a salute to scatology and Elizabethan manners (London: Printed for Subscribers only, 1936), and The Mimiambs of Herondas. He also designed the dust jacket for James Hanley's Ebb and Flow (London: John Lane, 1932), other Hanley novels for Lane, and Dorothy Richardson's Backwater (1916). He contributed to a number of periodicals such as The Gypsy, The Golden Hind (1922–25), the US Vanity Fair, The Studio, and the UK Argosy.
Alan Odle's brother was Edwin Vincent Odle (1890–1942), author of the minor science fiction classic The Clockwork Man (1923), and Odle was a friend and correspondent of the writer Claude Houghton.
The film director and Python Terry Gilliam is a connoisseur of his work.

• There is an article on him by Martin Steenson in the Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, October 1979.
• The Imaginative Book Illustration Society at [1] has a bibliography of the published drawings compiled by Martin Steenson : Studies in Illustration, Issue 9, Summer 1998.
• Martin Steenson has also published a book on Odle, The Life and Work of Alan Odle (Stroud: Books & Things, 2012),126 pages, ISBN 978-0-9544395-1-4 (includes a full bibliography) [2].
• Herbert B. Grimsditch, "Mr. Alan Odle: A Master of the Grotesque", The Studio, London, England, 1 January 1928, Volume 95, no.418, p. 23.
• "An Exhibition by Three Book Illustrators: John Austen, Harry Clarke and Alan Odle", The Studio, London, England, 15 May 1925, Volume 89, no.386, p. 261