The Fairytale-Themed 1976 Fender Guitar Catalog
Step aside, USA and your paltry 250th birthday. The year 2026 marks a far more meaningful anniversary. It's officially a full half a century since the debut of Fender's fairytale-themed guitar catalog.
We've covered vintage ephemora before, from '80s Maplin catalogs to the Condec Annual Report 1969. This one's a particularly giddy example, however, with Fender bringing in a couple artists to paint a series of full-page interstituals to advertise guitars by featuring classic fairytale and storybook characters.
You can find the entire catalog on the Internet Archive, but I've collected all the relevant illustrations here.
The cover art is by Ruby K. Lee. It's a parody of a 1914 piece by Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen (1886–1957) for East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Old Tales from the North.
Kay (rhymes with "high") Nielson was apparently freshly appreciated around this time, according to this art show writeup: "It took until the 1970s, with the revival of interest in illustration art, for Nielsen’s original artwork for the illustrations to be appreciated as fine art."
Page 2 has the first interior illustration, Bruce Wolfe's Alice in Wonderland riff.
Then we get a bunch of normal guitar catalog stuff, until page 36 and Wolfe's depiction of Goldilocks jamming with the three bears.
Page 50 is across from a section on vocal sound systems, so the pigs are singing in Wolfe's version of the big bad wolf and the three pigs. I like how far the wolf pops out of the frame.
Ruby K. Lee returns on page 54 for the section on acoustic instruments.
Lee appears to once again have borrowed from a 1914 Kay Nielson illustration, although the composition has been moved around a little to make the figure larger. The Nielson illustration is apparently titled “No sooner had he whistled” and shows a scene from “The Three Princesses in the Blue Mountain.”
Page 60 has Wolfe's Red Riding Hood.
Page 63 has Snow White. Wolfe's signature is missing on this one, so I can't confirm that it's his work. Some cool details here, from the bone mirror and cat twins to the dangling effigy.
Finally, Bruce Wolfe delivers a Jack and the Beanstalk illustration to end the fairytale art.
Cool Links:
Here's a gallery of art by Polish Surrealist Rafal Olbinski. I shared a couple of my favorites below, but there's a lot more through the link.
"The pun of Olbinski's work both promises and threatens, appears humorous but reveals grievance, and by studying these apparent contradictions, we learn how to better separate our impulses of the superficial from the desirable."
What Makes Alec Robbins Laugh - Humorism
Here's an interview with an alt comedian that I thought was fun.
Music Rec: A live concern from this past March that appears to be a couple guys playing the entire soundtrack to the 1997 first-person shooter game GoldenEye 007. My most Millennial music rec yet?
Next Time: Paying readers get my thoughts on the best Philippe Caza artworks, and, wow, it is tough to pick a favorite out of his incredible stuff.