Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Circle Fine Art Press) 1979

Art and story book

This limited-edition volume retells the story of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, while primarily serving as a showcase for artwork created during the production of the animated feature. For the first time, the general public was given access to more than 400 storyboard sketches, layout drawings, animation studies, and other pieces of production art from the Disney Studio Archives, much of it previously unpublished.

Produced by Walt Disney Studios in collaboration with Circle Fine Art Press, the book was issued in a limited run of 9,500 copies. Designed as a luxury collector’s item, it is bound in white leather with raised bands along the spine and 22-karat gold leaf lettering and highlights, echoing the appearance of the storybook prop seen in the film itself. The volume is housed in a red cloth-bound slipcase.

Four acetate serigraphs are also bound into the book to imitate animation cels, although they reproduce original paintings rather than actual production cels.

Contemporary advertisements suggest that the book was published around November 1979.

The material gathered for this prestigious edition was later repurposed in a more affordable and widely accessible version published by Viking Press.