October 2013 – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

JK Potter and HP Lovecraft

American artist JK Potter is another photo-montagist whose work since the 1970s has been very popular as illustration for books of horror, fantasy and science fiction. Potter’s portrait of HP Lovecraft on the October 1979 issue of Heavy Metal was my first introduction to his work. The original version of that picture can be seen below. Despite Potter’s flair for horror imagery there’s fewer Lovecraft illustrations than you might expect, certainly fewer than I used to hope there might be, although tentacles—real ones—do feature in a number of his other pictures.

While we’re on the subject, HPL continues to dog my footsteps. I recently autographed an enormous block of contributor signing sheets for a new doorstop anthology from Centipede Press. A Mountain Walked is a 636-page collection edited by Lovecraft scholar ST Joshi which will be published in March, 2014. Be warned that like many other Centipede volumes it won’t be cheap! Meanwhile I’m currently working on a new series of illustrations for a completely different anthology of Lovecraftian fiction. That will also be out early next year. It’s going to be a good one but I’ll say more about it at a later date.

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1990).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Holly Warburton record covers

Jesus Egg That Wept (1984) by Danielle Dax.

Most of the examples here are for singles and albums released by Danielle Dax in the 1980s but British artist Holly Warburton has done a lot more besides. The work from the 80s involved the re-photographing of images projected onto canvas or other materials, effects that are now more easily achieved by digital means. The Pop-Eyes cover was a substitute for the earlier, notorious “Meat Harvest” collage which Ms Dax hacked together from medical photos, and which caused the album to be shunned by shops and distributors for being too disturbing. (It’s here if you need to look.) There is a Holly Warburton website but there’s not much going on there at the moment. You can see more at Pinterest.

Pop-Eyes (1985) by Danielle Dax.

The Firebird (1986), the Montreal Symphony Orchestra conducted by Charles Dutoit.

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Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrated Poe

Halloween approaches. Edgar Allan Poe illustrators are legion—some of the better ones appeared here a couple of years ago (see the links below)—but I’d not seen these lithographs by Hugo Steiner-Prag (1880–1945) before. Steiner-Prag was an ideal illustrator for Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem so it’s a pleasure to see him addressing Poe’s poems. All the prints are from a collection at the Google Art Project which includes one of the Golem illustrations plus a set for The Tales of Hoffmann.

Spirits of the Dead.

The Sleeper.

To Zante.

The Raven.

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City of Night by John Rechy

City of Night (1963), Grove Press.

Surprising to read this week that John Rechy’s pioneering novel of gay nightlife in America is now fifty years old. The attitude and style of Rechy’s work looks so much to the 1970s that it seems out-of-place in a time when writing about male hustlers was almost as risky as being one. Charles Casillo revisits the novel for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and also talks to the author. Casillo turns up again at Lambda Literary to ask a collection of other writers for their recollections about Rechy and his work.

The usual curiosity impelled me to go looking for City of Night cover designs. The results are disappointing, there having been little advance from the Grove Press first edition (above) which I’m guessing was a Roy Kuhlman design. (And while we’re looking at it, Taxi Driver aficionados might note the “Fascination” sign.)

The Grove Press paperback (left) reused the photo, and set the template for many subsequent editions, all of which could easily be mistaken for crime novels. The early editions play safe but that solitary figure does at least communicate the book’s emphasis on loneliness. Later editions offer lazy variations on the words “city” and “night” with no indication that the book is also about sex.

The Panther (UK) paperback from 1969 is the edition I’m most familiar with, and it’s a surprise again to find that this cover design is still the best I’ve seen. Panther had a run of great cover designs from the late 60s into the 1970s, many of them uncredited. They also published a fair amount of gay fiction in editions that were smart and unsensational. This cover exemplifies the approach: sexy, direct, blurb-free, and with that enticing list of Joyce-like neologisms (“youngmen” is a Rechy trademark) on the back. Goodreads has a handful of other designs.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William E. Jones on Fred Halsted
• California boys by Mel Roberts

Wildeana 11

The Happy Prince And Other Tales (1888).

Continuing an occasional series. Recent Wildean links.

• Jeanette Winterson makes a persuasive case for the importance of Wilde’s stories for children: “Wilde had a streak of prophecy in him. The children’s stories can be read as notes from the future about Wilde’s fate. It is as though the little child in him was trying to warn him of the dangers his adult self would soon face. ‘Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy’, he writes in De Profundis.”

• At the Morgan Library & Museum: a collection of Wilde’s manuscripts and letters, including the MS of The Selfish Giant, one of the stories discussed in Winterson’s piece.

• At The Smart Set: “Oscar Wilde abandoned journalism and hated fashion – so why is his essay The Philosophy of Dress so important?” asks Nathaniel Popkin.

The Pictures of Sappho from The Woman’s World.

• Wilde’s The Philosophy of Dress led to his being asked to edit The Lady’s World in 1887, a magazine he promptly renamed The Woman’s World. He was editor for two years. A collected run of the magazine may be browsed here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive