In the late 1910s, in a Europe ravaged by World War I, Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen put the finishing touches on his illustrations of A Thousand and One Nights. The results are considered masterpieces of early 20th-century illustration: bursting with sumptuous colors of deep blues, reds, and gold leaf, and evoking all the magic of this legendary collection of Indo-Persian and Arabic folktales, compiled between the 8th and 13th centuries.However, publishers retreated from Nielsen s project in the financially strapped postwar climate, and the publication never happened.