Rene Beauclair

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Bijoux modernes (c. 1900) from a series of Art Nouveau designs by Rene Beauclair. As usual the peacock caught my attention on this page. There’s more by Beauclair at the NYPL Digital Gallery

Previously on { feuilleton }
Elizabetes Iela 10b, Riga
The Divine Sarah
Whistler’s Peacock Room
Lalique’s dragonflies
Lucien Gaillard

The monstrous tome

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So it arrived at last, yesterday in fact, the colossal volume that is A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft from Centipede Press. Calling this a book is like calling the Great Pyramid of Cheops a pile of stones, technically accurate but the words somewhat fail to convey the existential reality. This is the heaviest book I’ve ever come across, 400 pages of heavy-duty art paper at BIG size. (Amazon gives the dimensions as 16.1 x 12.6 x 2.3 inches or 409 x 320 x 580 mm.) The photo above shows the scale beside an old Mountains of Madness paperback (Ian Miller‘s cover art appears in full in the new book) and my own Haunter of the Dark collection. The cover art is by Michael Whelan, a detail from his wonderful 1981 HPL panoramas.

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The Virgil Finlay section showing The Colour Out of Space and his definitive Lovecraft portrait.

The range of contributors past and present includes JK Potter, HR Giger, Raymond Bayless, Ian Miller, Virgil Finlay, Lee Brown Coye, Hannes Bok, Rowena Morrill, Bob Eggleton, Allen Koszowski, Mike Mignola, Howard V. Brown, Michael Whelan, Tim White, Frank Frazetta, John Holmes, Harry O. Morris, Murray Tinkelman, Gabriel, Don Punchatz, Helmut Wenske, John Stewart, Thomas Ligotti and John Jude Palencar. The introduction is by Harlan Ellison and there’s an afterword by Thomas Ligotti. Many pages fold out to reveal spreads like the Giger ones below. Print quality is exceptional, of course, but then ladling the superlatives is pointless when it’s obvious this is a sui generis masterpiece of Lovecraftian art. Naturally I’m very happy indeed to be a part of it.

Continue reading “The monstrous tome”

Arthur Magazine needs $20,000 by July 1 or it will die

From Jay Babcock:

One year ago I ran up my credit cards and borrowed money from friends and family in order to buy out my ex-partner in Arthur. Since then I have maxed out my personal and business credit cards to service that debt and to start up publication of Arthur again. We have worked very hard with very little resources: some of us could afford to work pro bono, others could afford to work at well below market, still others couldn’t afford to work for Arthur but did it anyway.

Still, we have bills to pay, and debt to service. Starting up again costs money. And my credit cards are now maxed out.

On the heels of lower than expected ad sales (although they are trending up), increased production and distribution costs (higher quality printing and paper, higher fuel costs, increased printrun), and an “under-performing non-magazine product” (the Living Theatre dvd, for which we’ve sold less than 25% of the printrun since launch, received zero reviews or notices, etc), spiraling debt service payments (now $2k a month) on startup costs, and most importantly ZERO NEW BACKERS… we’ve finally reached the point where

WE HAVE NO MORE MONEY.

If we don’t obtain at least $20k in the next six days, ARTHUR is done. Our long-term prospects are good, if we are fortunate enough to make it through this rough patch.

Please help. No donation is too small.

Our preferred method of payment is Paypal. It is a free service to buyers, and enables you to pay directly By VISA, MASTERCARD, AMEX, DISCOVER or from your checking account or debit card. You can also convert foreign currency to U.S. dollars. Signing up only takes a few minutes.

Please use PayPal to make a donation to editor at arthurmag dot com

Thank you.

Jay Babcock
Arthur Magazine

Arthur: The Little Magazine That Could