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• • • Being a journal by artist and designer John Coulthart, cataloguing interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms.

Archive for the {books} category

 

Hollywood’s Favourite Cowboy

Hollywood’s Favourite Cowboy | Cormac McCarthy and The Road.

Posted in {books}, {cormac}, {film}, {noted} | No comments »

 


More book covers

One of my Cthulhu portraits as it appears in Image Swirl, a new Google feature-in-search-of-a-purpose. Yes, I own a portion of the Googleverse, or the Googleverse owns a portion of me; the latter seems more likely. As well as being the cover of my Lovecraft volume, that picture appeared earlier this year on a reprint [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {design}, {fantasy}, {illustrators}, {lovecraft}, {science fiction}, {technology}, {work} | No comments »

 


Wildeana

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1907).
I finished reading Neil McKenna’s excellent biography recently, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, a book which makes an ideal companion to Richard Ellmann’s 1987 life of Wilde. Whilst reading about the two trials I remembered that among five pages of digitised Wilde volumes at Archive.org there’s a 1906 book, [...]

Posted in {art}, {black and white}, {books}, {design}, {gay}, {illustrators} | No comments »

 


Nabokov book covers

Flowers are the sexual organs of plants, which may have been what designer David Pelham had in mind when he created this cover for the Penguin debut of Nabokov’s densely-written and erotic novel, Ada in 1970. (Butterfly orchids also feature in the text, of course.) The Russian maestro has been unavoidable lately on account of [...]

Posted in {books}, {design} | 2 comments »

 


American inferno

American inferno | David Vann on the malign magnificence of Blood Meridian.

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Netherlands decorated books

left: Over kunst en kunstenaars (1923); right: Over literatuur (1924).
A few examples from a collection of gorgeous Art Nouveau and Art Deco cover designs.
The books cover the period 1893–1939 and contains bindings in the Nieuwe Kunst and Art Nouveau styles by contemporary artists working in the Netherlands such as Jozef Cantre (1890–1957) and Jan Toroop [...]

Posted in {art nouveau}, {books}, {design} | No comments »

 


Dalí in Wonderland

I’d only seen one or two of Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland before but you can see the complete (?) set here. These date from 1969 when Dalí was well past his prime as an artist but they’re still worth a look to see how he tackled each chapter, using the skipping [...]

Posted in {animation}, {art}, {books}, {design}, {fantasy}, {film}, {illustrators}, {painting}, {surrealism} | 3 comments »

 


A life of rhyme

A life of rhyme | Robert Chalmers meets the great John Cooper Clarke.

Posted in {books}, {noted} | 1 comment »

 


Beardsley at the V&A

This battered item is my copy of the V&A guide to the landmark Aubrey Beardsley exhibition held at the museum from May to September 1966. That exhibition introduced Beardsley to a new public and made his work very trendy for a while, helped by the Beardsley-styled sleeve of the Beatles’ Revolver album which was released [...]

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A winter’s tale

A winter’s tale | Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver.

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Finch posters

I won’t say this is by popular demand but after persistent requests for posters of my cover art for Jeff VanderMeer’s latest novel, Finch, I’ve opened a new CafePress shop selling exactly that. The largest of these is 58.38cm x 82.55 (22.984″ x 32.5″) which should be big enough for most appetites. There’s also a [...]

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Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side Of “Stalker”

Stalker (1979).
Among the new documentary films being shown at the Sheffield (UK) Doc/Fest is Igor Mayboroda’s Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side Of “Stalker”.  Behind the unwieldy title there lies an exploration of the troubled genesis of one of my cult artefacts, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 science fiction film, Stalker, a personal adaptation by the director [...]

Posted in {books}, {film}, {music}, {science fiction} | 11 comments »

 


Drowned worlds

Hollywood at Night (2006).
Alexis Rockman’s paintings of swamped or ruined American landmarks present views which are a novelty in contemporary art galleries whilst being very familiar to science fiction readers. Many of these could well be illustrations for JG Ballard’s 1981 novel, Hello America, which imagined a depopulated United States reclaimed by flora and fauna. [...]

Posted in {architecture}, {art}, {books}, {cities}, {painting}, {science fiction}, {work} | 8 comments »

 


Virtual Alice

No, I didn’t go searching for this, I had my fill of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland last month. The British Library website is a lot more amenable than it used to be for the casual browser, and one of its newer sections is a small collection of what they call virtual books which enable you [...]

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A playlist for Halloween: Voodoo!

It’s become a tradition here to post a playlist for Halloween so here’s the one for this year, a collection of favourite “voodoo” music. Most are these pieces have as much to do with real voodoo as Bewitched does with real witchcraft but I like the atmospheres of Voodoo Exotica they evoke.
Voodoo Drums in Hi-Fi [...]

Posted in {books}, {film}, {horror}, {music}, {occult} | 5 comments »

 


The Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest

Bookplate by Denis Kostromitin.
Following the recent postings of covers and illustrations from Der Orchideengarten, Will at A Journey Round My Skull posts the results of his Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest which encouraged illustrators to create an Orchideengarten-styled bookplate design. You can see the winner and many other splendid entries on his pages. I fully intended [...]

Posted in {art}, {black and white}, {books}, {fantasy}, {horror}, {illustrators}, {magazines} | No comments »

 


The Watcher and Other Weird Stories by J Sheridan Le Fanu

Irish writer J Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) has long been a favourite of mine since I first discovered his weird tales in ghost story collections, still the place you’re most likely to find his work. His ghost stories are frequently superior to the more celebrated MR James (who edited a Le Fanu collection), they’re less [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {horror}, {illustrators}, {television} | 2 comments »

 


Equus and the Executionist

I wrote about Peter Shaffer’s fascinating play, Equus, in September last year, and in passing touched on the horse and Mari Lwyd-inspired paintings of Clive Hicks-Jenkins which seemed to complement the play’s themes of sexuality and passionate obsession. Callum James had been having similar thoughts about Clive’s art and urged his friends at The Old [...]

Posted in {art}, {black and white}, {books}, {gay}, {illustrators}, {photography}, {theatre}, {typography} | 1 comment »

 


Booklife by Jeff VanderMeer

Yet another of the titles I’ve been working on this year—yes, it’s been a very busy time—Booklife took several months of back and forth on the part of author, editor and designer before we had something that everyone was happy with.
Offering timely advice in an era when the burden of production and publicity frequently falls [...]

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Haeckel fractals

In which Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature are given the Mandelbrot treatment. The example above is one of a number of variations created using the splendid Gorgon-headed Starfish, a creature I’ve messed with myself a couple of times.
These fractal images have been created by the Subblue people using their Fractal Explorer plug-in for Adobe’s [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {science}, {technology} | 5 comments »

 


 

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2010 calendar

    Psychedelic Wonderland 2010 calendar

 


 

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