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Oddities and Curiosities: Helen Kirby's FILLY

It's not difficult to convince me to buy almost any book for a dollar. I plucked *Filly* from a dollar table in haste after a second's glance at the cover--the shop was about to close. *Filly* must be one of the oddest books it has ever been my questionable pleasure to own and finger at leisure. Helen Kirby wrote and illustrated this little biography in verse of Filly, her family, and her misadventures in romance. They are horse-headed humans--yes, reverse centaurs, as it were; their story is a rather faint satire on contemporary mores, while the dozens of illustrations are rather disturbing parodies of the likes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Singer Sargent (see the cover for Kirby's Rossetti riff). *Filly* is evidently a sequel--yes, there's *another* in this vein!--to *Martingale, the Tale of a Foalish (sic) Virgin*; Martingale is Filly's aunt.
There is something singularly disturbing about Kirby's conception--but why? We have become accustomed to Anubis' doggy *kopf*, Thoth's ibis-in-a-wig look, not to mention centaurs, sirens, nagas, and the whole array of waist-down hybrids. Yet there's a distinct frisson to be had in looking at Kirby's elegant torsos with hooves (yes!) and long equine snouts, in her free and at times "brushy" pencil work. The whole effect is Peter Arno Meets, say, Gelett Burgess.
I have not as yet been able to discover anything further about Mrs. Kirby (except for that "Mrs.," as per worldcat.org), but now, of course, I'll have to hunt down *Martingale*.