I was browsing through Barnes & Noble today, opening books more or less completely at random. I looked through a physics book for a while, making jokes to myself about how ignorance of the laws of nature is no excuse and imagining being arrested for breaking obscure theorums I had no idea existed, standing bewildered as the paradox police read to me all the infractions I'm guilty of.
Anyway.
Most of the new childrens' fantasy series blend together to me. In my head, there's just one series called A Series of Unfortunate Harry Potters and all the illustrated hardcovers lining the shelves of supermarkets are the products of one hyper-prolific author. I know intellectually that this isn't the case, but you try telling that to my glands.
So I'm looking through some-book-or-another and thinking "These illustrations are pretty good, actually; they kind of remind me of Tony DiTerlizzi. Then the light goes on in my brain and I realize that this is because Tony DiTerlizzi is the actual artist, and then an additional light comes on and I realize that what I've got in my hands is an actual encyclopedia of monsters with beautiful full-color illustrations entirely by Tony D, and how long has it been since the the last time that's happened? 1996, something like that, when the Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix Volume II came out? A while, anyway.
This one's called Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You and it's very good. What I really loved about the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual was how thoroughly Tony DiTerlizzi reinterpreted all the classic AD&D creatures, making a lot of them make sense for the first time ever. It was DiTerlizzi who first added bits inspired by actual insect anatomy to the rust monster, for example. He continues this approach in Spiderwick's Guide; the faeries and monsters there aren't just oddly-sized humans or human heads grafted on to animal bodies, but creatures who have evolved and adapted to fit into their various ecologies. The approach is that of a naturalist's journal of fantastic beings, and it's honestly the best example of the genre I've seen, at least since Peter Dickinson's The Flight of Dragons.
The cockatrice, for example, has a lizardish frill around its neck, and normal roosters living in the Invisible World have also evolved similar growths in order to discourage predators. The manticore, while clearly intelligent, looks like it could actually be an adaptation of a mundane big cat. Mermaids are clearly fish, not mammals: their hair is "actually external gill filaments used to extract oxygen from the water" and they're the first mermaids I've seen without mammary glands. Their lower bodies look like everything from sea horses to lobsters, and they're really quite beautiful. There are all sorts of other fun details: kelpies and unicorns have toes like eohippus rather than true hooves; goblins are born toothless and manufacture false teeth from wood, stone, glass, and old pen-tips; goblins, kobolds, and phookas have secondary eyes they use for heat and motion detection (this explains the D&D conceit of infravision/darkvision and also makes them look cool); the whole book is filled with faux-newsclippings and old engravings pasted in among the paintings and sketches as if this was a scrapbook of a working naturalist, something of the feel the Planes of Conflict boxed set had. There's an ogre in a suit, a goblin in a scarf, an algae-covered river troll, and gorgeous exotic will-o'-the-wisps that look like combinations of birds, crabs, jellyfish and dragonflies.
The text (apparently by Holly Black) is pretty much reworded straight from the actual folklore in most cases - the main invention is visual, although I really like the taxonomy applied to all the creatures, which is both whimsical and self-consistent. For example, both brownies and boggarts belong to the species Custos domesticus, both elves and changelings are all of the species Dryas nemorivagans, and banshees are of the species Dryas styx. Kelpies belong to the horse family, Equidae and the horse genus Equus, but their species is Equus carnivororus. There are three merfolk species listed: Siren pacificus, Siren atlanticus, and Siren caribbaeanus, each with radically different appearances.
It's not really planar, except insofar as the Plane of Faerie is planar, but it's worth mentioning here because it's Tony DiTerlizzi.
. Since my mention over at the Pits about lacking a reliable Australian source for this book, I've since found one and have now placed an order.
I believe you just sold me on a book.