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Collage by Chloé Poizat. • Xenis Emputae Travelling Band plays the Music of John Dee, and free at Bandcamp: Victorian Machine Music by Plinth, the “creaking, winding, piping, chiming and wood-knocking of Victorian parlour music machines”. • Jeremy Willard on Mikhail Kuzmin, “the Oscar Wilde of Russia”. Related: Conner Habib on the Disinfo podcast discussing [...]

Another recent work-related discovery, this edition of the tale of Sleeping Beauty was published in 1920. The text is by CS Evans, and the book is illustrated throughout by Arthur Rackham who forgoes his usual ink-and-wash style in favour of silhouettes. Many of Rackham’s other books employ silhouettes, usually as vignettes at the ends of [...]

Crossing. Artist Mark Reep sent me a link recently to his gallery of meticulous pencil and charcoal drawings which he calls “dreams in black and white”. The combination in many of these of isolated settings with minor architectural features is something I always enjoy seeing but don’t find often enough. Offhand I can think of [...]

Pamela Colman Smith’s work has appeared here before but this is an example of her early illustration I hadn’t seen until now. Annancy Stories (1899) was written and illustrated by Smith, being her own presentation of the Jamaican versions of the Anansi trickster stories. Smith’s mother was Jamaican, and the family lived in Kingston for [...]

Post number three thousand, and searching the memory for anything which might be filed under MMM led to more occult art. Moina MacGregor Mathers (1865–1928) was the wife of Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the 1880s. Moina was the sister of the French [...]

Alchemy (1969) by the Third Ear Band. Design by Dave Loxley. For an idea of how these posts often come into being, this one is the result of the following chain of association: an article by Leo Robson about the films of Roman Polanski > A re-viewing of Polanski’s Macbeth > A re-listening to albums [...]

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (2012) by Lesley Barnes. She also has peacock wrapping paper. The most popular post of the year was one I made last December featuring all the artists whose work had appeared throughout 2011 in the weekend links posts. (The surge of views occurred early in January when it was [...]

It’s taken a while but here at last are some of the pages from my series of illustrations based on The Picture of Dorian Gray, as featured in volume 2 of The Graphic Canon (“The World’s Great Literature as Comics and Visuals”) edited by Russ Kick. I agreed with Russ not to run everything so [...]

A couple of months ago I was starting to wonder whether I’d ever see this book printed, the production process became so tortuously drawn out. But Reverbstorm is finally in print and looking exactly the way I intended with black boards, black endpapers and black ink on the page edges. The latter proved to be [...]

A post for Día de los Muertos. The Internet Archive has several books reprinting the Dance of Death by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543). These samples are from an 1892 edition. There’s also a complete copy of the very rare original printing, Les Simulachres & Historiees Faces De La Mort, Autant Elegamme[n]t Pourtraictes, Que Artificiellement [...]

A Glove: Anxieties (1881) by Max Klinger. Although the Glove‘s scenario was given its due Germanic explication by contemporary critics, it defies rational analysis. The last picture, which was seen as a kind of happy ending to the glove’s peregrinations, is particularly ambiguous and leaves the whole meaning of the series in doubt. The story is [...]

An appraisal of the state of poster design from almost a century ago by Charles Matlack Price. Lots of the names you’d expect from Europe and the United States—Steinlen, Mucha, Beardsley, Will Bradley, Maxfield Parrish, etc—plus a number of examples I hadn’t seen before. Also a surprising scarcity of Italians and Germans. Scroll down for [...]

M15, The Whirlpool Galaxy photographed by Martin Pugh. The overall and deep space winner of Astronomy Photographer of the Year, 2012. • The Final Academy, the series of William Burroughs-themed events that took place in London and Manchester in 1982, will be celebrated at the Horse Hospital, London, on 27th October. Academy 23, a publication [...]

Back in 2008 I wrote at some length about Aubrey, an excellent BBC TV dramatisation of the last years of Aubrey Beardsley’s life written by John Selwyn Gilbert, and screened once in 1982. Mr Gilbert himself added a comment to that post in which he mentioned that he’d written and directed a documentary which was [...]

Illustration by Otto Verhagen from Yolanda – Het Boek van Bloei (1931) by Nan Copijn. Would-be Decadents is perhaps a better label, the Decadent ship having set sail across an absinthe-tinted sea by the time these artists were putting pen to paper. Their drawings are another set of scarce images forwarded by Sander Bink who [...]

There are no golems in Morris Rosenfeld’s Songs of the Ghetto (1899), translated here by Berthold Feiwel for a German readership as Lieder des Ghetto (1902). But the Berlin edition does contain many superb full-page illustrations and embellishments by Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874–1925), a German artist whose work has featured here on a number of occasions. [...]

Drawings from an edition of Alfred Tennyson’s Poems illustrated by British artist Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872–1945) which was published by George Bell & Sons in 1905. The book was part of a series of illustrated poetry collections that included several books featured here in previous posts: Poems by John Keats and Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley [...]

The idle question “Where can you find the best reproduction of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I?” was answered at the Google Art Project where there are four different prints to examine. As usual it seems churlish to complain but I would have preferred one decent copy and a few more Dürer engravings in place of the [...]

Illustrations for Dangerous Visions (1967) by Leo & Diane Dillon. top left: Lord Randy, My Son by Joe L. Hensley; top right: Gonna Roll the Bones by Fritz Leiber; bottom left: The Happy Breed by John Sladek; bottom right: Shall the Dust Praise Thee? by Damon Knight Beyond my love for them and my understanding [...]

From Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1966) by Isaac Bashevis Singer. All the obituaries of the late Maurice Sendak have focused inevitably on Where the Wild Things Are. That gives me a chance to draw attention to some less familiar Sendak drawings whose finer crosshatching naturally appeals to an inveterate crosshatcher such as myself. [...]