Design by Michelle Henning, drawings by PJ Harvey. An album that’s been a continual visitor to the Coulthart CD player over the past few months, Let England Shake was consciously composed like George Crumb’s Black Angels “in time of war”, referencing not only wars present but those long past. Coiled around the bellicose theme is [...]
Flower Me Gently (2010) by Linn Olofsdotter. Yes, this is one of those lazy end-of-year retrospectives, a look back at all the artists whose work was highlighted in the weekend posts for 2011. Thanks to BibliOdyssey, Form is Void and 50 Watts for so often pointing the way. Blasphemous Rumours (2009/2010) by Ryan Martin. The [...]
A little something for the season of strong drink. Harry Clarke’s books command high prices in their original editions yet two of the costliest items in the Clarke bibliography are a pair of promotional booklets the artist illustrated for Jameson & Son’s Irish Whiskey: A History of a Great House in 1924, and Elixir of [...]
It’s easy to loathe the teeth-grinding sentimentality of Charles Dickens’ seasonal tale, as well as its subtext which isn’t so far removed from Emperor Ming’s instruction to his cowed populace in Flash Gordon: “All creatures shall make merry…under pain of death.” Yet as a ghost story I prefer A Christmas Carol to the sketchier The [...]
A final Coleridge post, also the oldest illustrated edition featured this week. Gustave Doré’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was first published in 1870, and the poet’s sombre, doom-laden tale was more suited to Doré’s Gothic proclivities than many of the lighter books he illustrated. Despite their age, these engravings have proved memorable enough [...]
From Patten Wilson to Joseph Noel Paton (1821–1901), a Scottish artist whose illustrations for Coleridge’s poem I much prefer to his generic paintings. Other artists often skimp on the ship details but Paton’s crowded deck scenes are done with such accuracy they must have been based on a real vessel. The book was published in [...]
As is evident by the blurred date on the title page, this illustrated Coleridge by Patten Wilson (1868–1928) was published in 1898. Once again, some of these drawings have appeared here before via copies at Chris Mullen’s Visual Telling of Stories where the scans are a lot better quality than the dreadful job done by [...]
This angel figure appeared here just over a year ago in a selection from Modern Book Illustrators and Their Work (1914). Subsequent searching at the Internet Archive turned up a well-used copy of The Poems of Coleridge (1907) from which the drawing originates. Gerald Metcalfe (1894–1929), was a British artist whose ink renderings often resemble [...]
Portrait of Jessie M. King by J. Craig Annan (autochrome). I don’t recall having seen a photo of artist Jessie M. King prior to this so it’s an additional surprise to find one in colour. All these examples are from Colour Photography: and other recent developments of the art of the camera (1908), one of [...]
A drawing from Bestiario Moderno by Domenico Gnoli (1933–1970). RIP Russell Hoban. Nina Allan celebrates a favourite writer while David Mitchell, writing in 2005, pays tribute to Riddley Walker. For me the gulf between Hoban and many of his contemporaries could be measured by his entry in the Writer’s Rooms feature the Guardian Review was [...]
A peacock. Photograph by Vidhya Narayanan. Posted at the Weird Fiction Review in the past week, The Weird (or Étrange) Questionnaire is Éric Poindron’s Weird (or Étrange) riposte to the Proust Questionnaire. I’d read the post, and seen Jeff VanderMeer’s answers to the questions, but wasn’t planning on answering it myself until Neddal Ayad wrote [...]
Here’s a picture whose myriad details I’ve wanted to scrutinise for many years. Lieven Cruyl was the draughtsman and Coenraet Decker the etcher while the picture itself appears as an illustration in Athanasius Kircher’s (deep breath) Turris Babel, Sive Archontologia Qua Primo Priscorum post diluvium hominum vita, mores rerumque gestarum magnitudo, Secundo Turris fabrica civitatumque [...]
Three new cover designs of mine for Angry Robot which were made public a few hours ago. The Courts of the Feyre is a fantasy series by British author Mike Shevdon set in present-day Britain and involving “a world of dark magic and strange creatures hidden in plain sight.” Two of these titles are reprints, [...]
Words and Music (1975) by Tom Phillips. Two related posts is coincidence, three is a series. Earlier posts from the past couple of weeks looked at album covers created by designers better known for their work in other areas. Tom Phillips is a British artist, writer and composer who I continue to insist is one [...]
Happy Cthulhumas. I found the time over the past couple of weeks to finish a piece of art begun in September 2008, something I’d half-completed then abandoned due to pressure of other work. I’d quite forgotten about this until I discovered the files when going through some archive discs. What began as a pencil outline [...]
A short anecdotal film by artist and animator Drew Christie in which musicologist John Cohen relates his first encounter with mercurial polymath Harry Smith, a man small in stature but large in interests and influence. Christie is something of a polymath himself since he also provides the banjo soundtrack. There’s more art and animation at [...]
Typographic Composition (1924) by Teresa Zarnowerówna from a post about Polish graphic design at 50 Watts. • “Direct action is a matter of acting as if you were already free… [...] …the link between military and money systems remains the dirty secret of capitalism.” A lengthy and essential interview with “anarchist anthropologist” David Graeber, author [...]
Like yesterday’s squid, some of these Theosophist illustrations from Thought-Forms (1905) by Charles Webster Leadbeater & Annie Besant, and Man Visible and Invisible: Examples of different types of men as seen by means of trained clairvoyance (1902) by Leadbeater alone, have been reproduced for years in books yet you seldom see the complete set. The [...]
If this isn’t quite the ur-Kraken of illustration history, it’s one of them, reproduced countless times when sea monster depictions are required. The source is Histoire naturelle, générale et particuliere, des mollusques, animaux sans vertèbres et a sang blanc (1802) by Felix de Roissy, some of whose other illustrations are in this Flickr set from [...]
International Monster (1993). I found this drawing on a Tumblr site, as I recall, then traced its lineage back to the artist’s own Tumblr, and his own website where he states that “This site contains fucked up shit. If that bugs you please go away.” After all that it was a surprise to discover that [...]
The Flatiron Building, Detroit Publishing Company (1903). Beautiful Century posted this view of New York’s Flatiron Building at the weekend which had me looking for a larger copy. Happily this is one of the many high-resolution photos at the Shorpy Historical Archive where it’s possible to scrutinise a wealth of detail. Old photos like this [...]
Being a new ebook imprint from Ann & Jeff VanderMeer: Cheeky Frawg Books has launched a new website. Does it sell our ebooks? Yes! But very…cheekily. It’s an interactive and mysterious experience you truly won’t want to miss, in a 180-degree scrollable environment. Free content, hidden treasures, singing fish, the animated Myster Odd video, and, [...]
An 8-minute film by Julian Biggs from 1964 (IMDB says 1965) which turns the streets of Montreal into post-apocalypse tableaux. This short black-and-white film shows eerie scenes of a downtown without people. The effect is disturbing. The camera shoots familiar urban scenes, without a soul in sight: streets empty, buildings empty, yet everywhere there is [...]
Untitled art by Katie Scott. “…the very fact that people cannot get published by the big-name publishers in the way that they used to has meant that you’ve got some really interesting and often really beautiful little small publishing houses that are springing up and coming into existence. And the stuff that they’re providing is [...]
Design by Peter Whorf Graphics. Another album cover post, and one I’ve wanted to do for a while. Parody covers are a curious sub-genre of sleeve design, and this post was prompted in part by an email from Easy On The Eye books alerting me to the publication this month of Covered, a collection of [...]
Invitation to Yin and Yang by Steven Arnold. “Less is NOT more, MORE is more, less is less.” Steven Arnold Thanks to Monsieur Thombeau for pointing the way to The Steven Arnold Archive, a respository of biographical and career detail about Steven Arnold (1943–1994): …a California-based multi-media artist, spiritualist, gender bender, and protégée of Salvador [...]
Music For Space Squirrels (1958) by Al Caiola’s Magic Guitars. Having sought out Saul Bass’s album cover designs recently, curiosity impelled me to see what fellow New York designer Milton Glaser had been doing during the same period. I already knew some of Glaser’s covers for the Tomato label in the 1970s but Discogs has [...]
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