BookBench by Trevor Skempton. Continuing an occasional series. Recent (and not-so-recent) Wildean links. • The BookBench above is one of several pieces of street furniture placed around London last autumn all of which were based on literary works past and present. Trevor Skempton’s design for Oscar Wilde was based on The Importance of Being Earnest […]
Genesia (2011) by Bette Burgoyne. • “…so I started buying these old gay porn novels, just for the covers and kept on collecting them.” Maitland McDonagh on the underexamined world of gay pulp. McDonagh’s 120 Days Books is reprinting some of these scarce titles. More gay erotica: Plans are afoot to republish Des Grieux, the […]
Illustrated editions of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales are so numerous it’s easy to overlook the better examples. Kay Nielsen’s edition isn’t only better than most, it’s an outstanding example of his meticulous approach to story illustration. Hansel and Gretel and Other Stories was published in 1925, and the beautiful colour plates really need to […]
Ghost in the Machine (2012) by Hope Kroll. • Nothing Here Now But The Recordings, an album of William Burroughs’ personal tapes originally released by Industrial Records is reissued on vinyl this month. Andrew Spragg reviews it here. Burroughs’ readings fill several collections but this one was the first I owned, and it’s always been […]
Awake Gróa, Awake Mother. The book is Our Fathers’ Godsaga (1911), tales of the Norse gods by Viktor Rydberg. The illustrations are by Swedish artist John Bauer (1882–1918), and may be seen at a larger size here. Bauer’s drawing of Gróa makes me think of the opening scene of David Rudkin’s television film Artemis 81, […]
Art by and for the library of Aangel Mendez (1950). Only the first example here is overtly erotic but the one below is tagged as such on this site which displays a huge variety of bookplate designs. There’s more to be found in the Ex Eroticis Libris, Erotica, and Nude sections. Pretty much everything there […]
Art by David Ho. This may be a frustrating post for some since it concerns a limited edition anthology that sold out almost as soon as it was announced a year or so ago. Even though the book was published last year it’s taken a few months for my copies to arrive. A Mountain Walked […]
If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like. Goebbels was in favour of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favour of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favour of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. […]
I wrote something about French designer and architect René Binet (1866–1911) a few years ago while exploring the creation of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. Binet designed the remarkable monumental gate that formed the entrance to the exhibition, a structure that demonstrated his proposal that natural forms might replace historical pastiche as a basis […]
The Death of Chatterton (2014) by Kehinde Wiley. • Mixes of the week (and the week before that): The Conjurer’s Hexmas: Second Rite by SeraphicManta; Secret Thirteen Mix 140 by Deaf Center; Best of 2014: A Highly Opinionated Mix by Robin The Fog. • Never mind Music for Airports, how about Music for Neurosurgery? The […]
Ending the year with some Heath Robinson illustrations I’d not seen before, probably because their grotesque qualities set them apart from the rest of his whimsical drawings and fairy tale illustrations. Illustrated editions of Rabelais are rare owing to the coarse and scatological nature of the novels. Gustave Doré‘s robust and bloodthirsty character made him […]
British illustrator William Heath Robinson died in 1944 which means that 2015 will see his own books fall into the public domain in many countries. The books he produced during and after the First World War established his reputation as a creator of impromptu contraptions, to such a degree that the term “Heath Robinson” has […]
Picking up where we left off, I was thrilled to find that Micheál MacLiammóir’s one-man dramatised biography of Oscar Wilde had finally made it to YouTube. The Importance of Being Oscar was MacLiammóir’s 100-minute magnum opus, an acclaimed condensation of Wilde’s life and work first performed at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 1960. Hilton Edwards […]
The Crystal Gazer (or The Magic Crystal, 1904) by Gertrude Käsebier. • “I had to resort to extreme violence”: how Hipgnosis revolutionised the album sleeve. Aubrey Powell, last surviving member of the design team, talks to Joe Muggs. • Mixes of the week: Radio Belbury: Programme 14; The Conjurer’s Hexmas by SeraphicManta; Secret Mix 139 […]
Another resurrected article. Cinema Rising was a short-lived newsprint film magazine that ran for three issues in the UK in 1972. I have a few pages from the rare first issue that was part of a batch of old underground newspapers I was given a few years ago. (The Frendz Hawkwind strip is from the […]
Browsing through the available back issues of Oz magazine recently I noticed a guide to gay slang which I didn’t recall seeing before. The underground magazines and newspapers of the 60s and 70s were a lot more tolerant of the nascent gay rights movement that their “straight” (ie: non-freak) counterparts. Oz magazine published pieces about […]
Photo of the author by Linda Moorcock. I mentioned a few days ago that I had another new piece of work to reveal, and this is it, a poster/promotional piece for Russell Wall’s forthcoming documentary about Michael Moorcock. The main challenge with one was to create something that would give a sense of Moorcock’s extensive […]
We Are The Water – Snow Drawings Project, Colorado (2014) by Sonja Hinrichsen with 50 volunteers. • I don’t do end-of-year lists but Dennis Cooper does. My thanks to Dennis once more for including this blog among his selections. Also there is Jonathan Glazer’s film of Under the Skin, an adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel […]
As usual, one thing leads to another. Research for yesterday’s post turned up a Caza book cover I’d not seen before. Les Miférables was published by Éric Losfeld in 1971, a year after producing Caza’s eyeball-searing psychedelic comic book Kris Kool. The author sounds like a character, a friend of André Breton who wrote a […]
Saga de Xam, a large-format comic book published by Éric Losfeld in 1967, is another example of French erotic psychedelia that remained off my radar until I got my hands on the exhibition catalogue for the Musée d’Orsay’s Art Nouveau Revival show in 2010. The glorious drawing below was used as the background for the […]
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