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The Blue Girl (2013) by Sungwon. • “Meanwhile, in her parents’ room [Max] Ernst painted aardvarks eating ants and big human hands around the windows. ‘Sexual connotations, I think,’ she says shyly.” Agnès Poirier talks to Cécile Eluard about her childhood among the Surrealists. • “Thrilling and prophetic”: why film-maker Chris Marker‘s radical images influenced […]

For the past week I’ve been downloading more of the books at the Internet Archive illustrated by Matthäus Merian. Among the hoard there’s a two-volume set of Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi, Maioris scilicet et Minoris, metaphysica, physica, atque technica Historia (1617–1626), a remarkable work which attempts to cover all the metaphysical, scientific and artistic knowledge […]

More new work of mine has been unveiled in the past few days so I can show these here. The Buried Life and Cities and Thrones are a pair of fantasy novels by new author Carrie Patel being published by Angry Robot. I was asked to provide something in an engraved style set against a […]

A crowd-funding goal has been announced for The Dreamlands, a feature film set in the worlds of HP Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle which, if it goes ahead, will be director Huan Vu’s second Lovecraftian feature. His first, Die Farbe (2010), is an excellent adaptation of The Colour Out of Space which impressed me with its atmosphere […]

Chthonic Cities by David Chatton Barker. One of a series of Folklore Tapes screenprints available from Bleep. • The original version of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising, the one with the Jimmy Page soundtrack that was completed in 1973, has always been described as lost/stolen/buried or otherwise gone forever. So you’d think the news that a […]

More from the storehouse of wonders that is the Getty Alchemy Collection at the Internet Archive. The illustrations here are from the 1678 edition of the Musaeum Hermeticum, a lengthy collection of alchemical texts with engraved illustrations by Matthäus Merian (1593–1650). Merian’s illustrations are some of the most frequently reprinted of all those you’ll find in […]

I would have changed the subject today if it wasn’t for spotting a copy of David Solomon’s LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug (1964) in Roger Corman’s notorious and rather creditable stab at psychedelia, The Trip (1967). Corman’s film is an oddity in his run of AIP exploitation films in being far less condemnatory than you’d expect […]

Nova Express (2014) by Paul Komoda. • Last week it was Kraftwerk, this week it’s Can in another astonishing 70-minute TV performance from 1970. For those who know where to look in the torrent world there are copies of these recordings circulating there. • JG Ballard: five years on. Extracts from introductions by John Gray, […]

LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug (1964). From serious scientific study, to tabloid concern, to psychedelic exploitation…a brief evolution of acid-related cover art in books and magazines. These are mostly American titles so who knows what else has yet to be rediscovered. LSD (1966) by Richard Alpert & Sidney Cohen. LIFE, March 25th, 1966. See inner pages […]

I posted my illustrations for this anthology back in December, after which Tachyon also asked me to create a cover for the book, something that hadn’t been planned at the outset. Lovecraft’s Monsters, edited by Ellen Datlow, is in the shops this month so here’s the cover and a few of my page layouts from […]

King’s Cloak (2012) by Alice Lin. • The week in Finnegans Wake: illustrations by John Vernon Lord for a new Folio Society edition; The Guardian‘s review from 1939; Christina Scholz explores Joyce’s use of the Ant and the Grasshopper fable; Sheng Yun wonders when Dai Congrong will compete the first Chinese translation of the book; […]

Underweysung der Messung (1525), a book of drawing instruction by the great Albrecht Dürer, predates Hieronymus Rodler’s “useful booklet” by six years. This also includes some perspective work although the lessons here are mostly concerned with the careful construction of various shapes, tesselated patterns and solid figures. Two of the illustrations at the end showing […]

Another treatise on perspective, and an older one than Pozzo’s so the drawings are somewhat cruder. Eyn schön nützlich büchlin und underweisung der kunst des Messens (A Fine, Useful Booklet and Instruction in the Art of Measurement) by Hieronymus Rodler was published in 1531, and features a number of full-page views where the perspective is […]

I’m working on more engraving collage at the moment so I’ve been delving into the scanned books at the Internet Archive once more in search of raw material. I still tend to use things scanned from paper volumes but the Internet Archive is useful for small details, and searches there also have the advantage of […]

The Dancer (1967) by Antony Little. My thanks to Sweet Jane this time for alerting me to her post about a series of Beardsley-inspired illustrations from 1967 by Biba designer Antony Little. The Wandering Jew and Other Stories was the first translation in English of Apollinaire’s 1910 collection L’Hérèsiarque et Cie. I’ve known about this […]

RIP Steve Moore. We never met, unfortunately, but I was very pleased he asked me to create a cover for his unique occult novel, Somnium, in 2011. Prior to this we’d been connected by shared acquaintances, colleagues, and membership in the informal cabal that was (and maybe still is) The Moon & Serpent Grand Egyptian […]

The latest interview at the essential BUTT magazine is Danny Calvi talking to ex-fashion illustrator and erotica artist Robert W. Richards about his life and work. I’d seen some of Richards’ drawings before but this is the first time I’ve seen him interviewed; one of the many commendable things about BUTT is the way they seek […]

Cover art: In the Palm of the Absinthe Woods by Aria/ShePaintsWithBlood. Last year I was asked to contribute a piece of fiction to a rural horror special of Morpheus Tales. In time for the Spring Equinox, The Horror Fields, edited by Matt Leyshon, is now unleashed. Inside there’s my short story, Figures in a Landscape, […]

Triangular buildings aren’t so very unusual, triangular books, on the other hand, are less common. This example is from the Manly Palmer Hall collection of alchemical manuscripts at the Internet Archive, not only a triangular book but one where most of the pages are written in a symbolic alphabet. A reviewer supplies the following details […]

Memorials of Old Northamptonshire (1903), a book edited by Alice Dryden, includes an entire chapter by M. Jourdain about Thomas Tresham’s Triangular Lodge. Descriptions of the building usually skate over the Catholic symbolism encoded in its structure but Jourdain goes into some detail describing the many inscriptions and numerological details. The engraved illustration is rather […]