fully aware of the joke and, on informal occasions, had been willing to contribute to it. Rackham enjoyed poking fun at himself – a sure sign of a healthy state of mind.
When the American George Macy called on Rackham in the summer of 1936 at his ivy-covered, red-roofed cottage studio off Fitzroy Road, he, too, found him ‘looking like a character out of one of his own drawings’. ‘In the last years of his life, when I knew him,’ wrote Macy in The Horn Book (May–June 1940), ‘his head seemed always cocked to one side, bright and eager and smiling and cheerful; his cheeks were pink and bright; his eyes bright blue and clear; his emotions used his face as a field to play on.’ Macy had called on behalf of the Limited Editions Club of New York to invite Rackham to illustrate James Stephens’ The Crock of Gold. He found him, for
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