Category: {books}

Books

Max Eastley’s musical sculptures

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left: Aeolian Harp; right: Wind Flute. 

The Wire has a selection of Max Eastley-related materials among the web exclusives on its site. As well as a photo gallery showing many of his musical instrument/artworks there’s a couple of video clips including part of Simon Reynell’s 1989 film, Clocks of the Midnight Hours. (Title borrowed from a poem by Borges.)

And as you’d expect there’s Eastley work to be seen and heard at YouTube as well, including an extract from Derek Bailey’s excellent documentary series about improvised music, On the Edge. For Eastley on record I’d recommend his 1994 CD with David Toop, Buried Dreams, but that seems to be out of print for the time being.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Avant Garde Project

Old book covers

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The Art of Illuminating As Practised in Europe from the Earliest Times by WR Symms (1860).

From the days when blocking was an art. One of a number of lavish board designs which can be found at Fromoldbooks.org.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Decorated Russian book covers
• The Hetzel editions of Jules Verne

Pasticheur’s Addiction

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The Boojum Press edition of the Guide (1997).
(Frame supplied by Mark Roberts.)

A few days ago we had the CD cover meme which encourages people to create cover designs for invented groups generated by random means. In a similar vein but minus the random element there’s the growing selection of books by reclusive author Constance Eakins. A Flickr pool has been established for newly-discovered Eakins volumes and you can read more about the mysterious writer here.

This flourishing of pasticheury encourages me to post some of the cover designs I created for the various editions of The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Invented and Discredited Diseases, a fake disease guide published in 2003 and edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts. The anthology featured a host of notable contributors and was great fun to work on. Although these were done in colour, they were all printed in black & white inside the book, with a shrunken glimpse of the colour versions on the rear of the dust jacket. My jacket design wasn’t used on subsequent printings so this is the first many people will have seen of these.

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