{ feuilleton }

‘Father of LSD’ dies aged 102
| Albert Hofmann, RIP.

Tribute to Michael Moorcock
| In which the writer achieves Grandmaster status.

The Vision of Faust (1878).
A suitably sorcerous bacchanal for Walpurgis Night by the Spanish painter. There’s more of his voluptuous erotica at ArtMagick and The Atheneum.

The Witches Sabbath aka Muse of the Night (1880).
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Weel done, Cutty-sark!

The Art of Illuminating As Practised in Europe from the Earliest Times by WR Symms (1860).
From the days when blocking was an art. One of a number of lavish board designs which can be found at Fromoldbooks.org.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Decorated Russian book covers
• The […]

It’s not exactly news that Portishead’s long-awaited third studio album is released today, its arrival having been telegraphed for months. I’ve been a fan since I heard the first theremin-inflected strains of Mysterons back in 1994 so I’d been looking forward to this. After a hiatus of ten years the burden of expectation grows very […]

Natural wonders
| The splendour of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Plasmatic Spree (2006).

Florimond by Jean-Philippe Guillemain.

I was rather aggrieved a few weeks ago when I found a copy of James Whitcomb Riley’s The Flying Islands of the Night (1913) at Archive.org. Nice to find a free copy of a rare book but the grievance came as a result of an intention to write something about its illustrator, Franklin Booth (1874–1948), […]

Voyageur IV (1995).
Born in Paris in 1941, he confesses to being largely “…self-taught. I was always at the Louvre, staring like crazy at the pictures there, fascinated by ‘how it’s done’.” … (Leonor) Fini’s works from the 60s influenced, to a degree, the young Henricot. Depicted in a hieratic style with underlying geometrical forms, […]