The Gates of the Inferno (no date). The web continues to be an incomparable treat for anyone interested in art history. One of the great advantages of the BBC’s Your Paintings site is having the opportunity to see pictures by artists whose output would rarely be deemed important enough to appear in a book. Albert […]
50 Rue de Rennes (1900) by Eugène Atget. I live in the Court of the Dragon, a narrow passage that leads from the Rue de Rennes to the Rue du Dragon. It is an “impasse”; traversable only for foot passengers. Over the entrance on the Rue de Rennes is a balcony, supported by an iron […]
Graphic for the title page and ends of chapters. I don’t usually post things so far away from publication, but editor Ellen Datlow put these pictures on her Facebook page a few hours ago so I may as well do the same here. Back in February I bought a Wacom Intuos drawing tablet, something I’ve […]
The Baron in the Trees (2011), a book-cut sculpture by Su Blackwell. Kurt Andersen at Vanity Fair examines the latest claims that Vermeer used a combination of lenses and mirrors to aid the creation of his remarkable paintings. David Hockney caused a considerable fuss in 2006 when he made similar assertions. Andersen recounts how Tim […]
Ulysses (1934), designed by Ernst Reichl; Complete Works of Isidore Ducasse (1967), designed by Pierre Faucheux. On the design front, that is, not the writing one. Ernst Reichl’s design for the 1934 Random House edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (the first US edition) has a cover which isn’t so different to the many Art Deco-style […]
Ex libris Fritz Waerndorfer (1903). I could happily post things by the indefatigable Koloman Moser (1868–1918) all the time but he’s not exactly an unknown figure even if his work does get overshadowed by his colleague in the Vienna Secession, Gustav Klimt. This handful of ex libris plates almost all date from the Secession period, […]
Another not-so-old TV documentary. It’s good to keep finding these as I have no means at the moment of viewing all the video tapes I’ve kept. Bookmark is (or was) a BBC series about the lives of various writers. This edition concerns author and artist Mervyn Peake, and was broadcast in 1998, shortly before the […]
The Pledge. As mentioned last week, the BFI’s DVD of Schalcken the Painter includes as extras two short films by other directors. Edward Abraham’s The Pit (1962) is an adaptation of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum which is creditable but lacks the sustained malevolence of Jan Svankmajer’s version. The second film is The Pledge […]
Delia Derbyshire (2007) by Iker Spozio. Whatever you think of Doctor Who, Delia Derbyshire’s recording of Ron Grainer’s theme tune is a landmark piece of electronic music. Those glassy electronic tones still sound unique today, not least for their having been created using rudimentary oscillators and much laborious tape editing. In Radiophonic Workshop: the shadowy […]
One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack (2004) by Wangechi Mutu. I wouldn’t be so bold as to call Benjamin Noys’ contribution to the recent The Weird conference at the University of London a highlight, but it was a surprise to find Lord Horror in general and the Reverbstorm book in particular being discussed alongside so […]
Doctor Strange was one of the few superheroes I had any time for, at least when Frank Brunner was drawing the series in the 1970s. His art was a cut above the Kirby imitators, and his ability to convey an endless variety of sorcerous weirdness through inventive drawing and composition made for some memorable comics. […]
L’uomo che piantava gli alberi (2013) by Sofia Rondelli. Via Form Is Void. • I’m looking forward to hearing the new album by Chrome Hoof, a band whose ambition and attitude makes many of their contemporaries seem lukewarm at best. Mick Middles gets to grips with Chrome Black Gold here. John Doran interviewed the group […]
Penguin, 2009. Photo by Lisa Johansson. Having recently re-read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) I thought it was about time I read her final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), and I’m very pleased that I did. I was less pleased, however, with the cover of the current edition […]
Gevatter Tod (Godfather Death, 1905) by Heinrich Lefler. Via Beautiful Century. An inevitable hangover from Halloween this week. At 50 Watts: A Modern Dance of Death (c. 1894) by Joseph Sattler, Harry Clarke Revisited, and more Ex Libris Mr Reaper | At Design Observer: Keith Eggener on When Buildings Kill: Sentient Houses in Fiction and […]
New illustration work has had me searching again through the Internet Archive’s scanned books so there may be a surfeit of these postings for a while. One of the more fascinating areas of that site for my purposes is the Winterthur Museum Library which has a large quantity of manufacturers’ and retailers’ catalogues. This is […]
A post for Día de los Muertos. The 16th-century Dance of Death by Hans Holbein the Younger has been copied and adapted many times, often with results that add little to the original. These engravings by Michael Heinrich Rentz (1701–1758) from Der Sogenannte Todentanz (1767) feature some impressive compositions, the subject being the traditional one of […]
La table qui tourne (1943) by Robert Doisneau. In [Gödel, Escher, Bach], Hofstadter was calling for an approach to AI concerned less with solving human problems intelligently than with understanding human intelligence—at precisely the moment that such an approach, having borne so little fruit, was being abandoned. His star faded quickly. He would increasingly find […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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