With tongue planted firmly in cheek, the author poses as the Victorian scientist Rowland W. Greasebeam to serve up this compendium of dragon lore and sheer inventive nonsense. Expanding on a dozen illustrations from his calendar Dragons Draaks & Beasties, Base fabricates a trio of correspondents a Viking, a Chinese silk trader and a Prussian explorer whose letters chronicle their discoveries of dragons in various continents.
The resulting web of yarns that Base spins is nothing short of hilarious ("Hope the looting and pillaging went well," writes Bjorn of Bromme in a letter to Olaf the Grim, for instance). Illustrations showcase the kind of intricate detail for which Base is so well known, and he bolsters his dragon art with a deadpan running commentary set in a border at the bottom of each page. "Dagbar defunctus est" notes one caption in a fit of understatement, as the accompanying cartoon depicts the demise of one of Bjorn's companions.
