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Alla Nazimova as Salomé (1923).
I wrote a while ago about Alla Nazimova’s luscious silent film production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, a suitably Decadent affair with an allegedly all-gay cast, and costume and stage design based on Aubrey Beardsley’s celebrated illustrations. The film is currently touring England and Wales with a new score for four musicians [...]

One of a series of stunning ads by Y&R of Chicago for the River North Chicago Dance Company which give the old “body as machine” a contemporary and rather erotic twist. (I would have credited the photographer but the ad agency site is the usual Flash interface which refuses to work in any of [...]

The Million Volt Light & Sound Rave (1967).
More psychedelia as Paul Gorman at The Look alerts me to an exhibition of work by Pop artist Dudley Edwards running this month at 3345 Parr St, Liverpool. Edwards was a part of the Binder, Edwards & Vaughan design collective in the 1960s, renowned for their light shows [...]

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 [...]

This month is a major one in book publishing as Carl Jung’s magnum opus The Red Book, or Liber Novus, which has remained unpublished for 80 years, is issued in a facsimile edition. Selections of pages have been turning up in reviews and online previews which easily whet the appetite.
In his late 30s, Jung started [...]

So I had a bright idea at the end of September… Instead of rehashing old work for a CafePress calendar design, I thought I’d try something new. I hadn’t done any artwork for myself all year, everything I’d been working on was a commission of some sort. In addition to that, I’d spent a large [...]

top row: The Division Bell by Pink Floyd; A Rush of Blood to the Head by Coldplay.
bottom row: London Calling by The Clash; Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield.
The Royal Mail follows its series of British Design Classics postage stamps with a series dedicated to what they call “classic” album covers. The design classics in [...]

…or Indian palaces have the best doorways. These are from the City Palace, Jaipur, also home to what is claimed to be the world’s largest silver object.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jaipur Observatory panoramas
• The Jantar Mantar

National Coming Out Day is a gay awareness day which has been observed in America since 1988, and is now something of an international event if “the world” can mean the USA and a handful of European countries. With typical contrariness, the UK’s Coming Out Day is a day later on October 12th. The Outer [...]

left: The Soft Machine Turns On (1967); right: UFO Coming (1967).
This was a bitter blow coming at a time when I’ve been working on something inspired in part by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, the 1960s design duo comprised of Michael English and Nigel Waymouth. The two artists, together with associate Martin Sharp, are indelibly [...]

Mighty Baby (1969). Illustration by Martin Sharp.

Yet another album cover prompts this post, part of an occasional series. Mighty Baby were a British rock band who formed out of psychedelic group The Action in the late Sixties, and their music is fairly typical of the period, being “heavy” without any of the psych trappings which—for [...]

Posters by Swedish artist Wilhelm Kåge (1889–1960) at the National Library of Sweden. Kåge is better known for his later ceramic work, some of which can be seen here.
Via @assemblyman_eph.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Einar Nerman

Fortunate Londoners can get to see a new exhibition, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘Dune’: An exhibition of a film of a book that never was, which runs at The Drawing Room until October 25, 2009. As well as production designs from concept artists Moebius, HR Giger and Chris Foss, there’s newly commissioned work by artists Steven Claydon, [...]

L’enfant penchée.

We’re at the penultimate post in this week-long tribute to the Cités Obscures series of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, and there isn’t enough space left to cover some of the more recent volumes in detail. What follows is a quick skate through three more major works.

L’enfant penchée.
L’enfant penchée (1996), or The Leaning Child, [...]

Ferdinand and Hella look down on the skyscrapers of Brüsel.
La route d’Armilia (1988) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the next substantial story in the Cités Obscures series after La Tour; there was also a book about transportation in the Obscure World, L’Encyclopédie des transports présents et à venir, published the same year. La [...]

La fièvre d’Urbicande (1985) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the second volume in the Cités Obscures series. This was the one which captured my attention the most when I first saw it. The book opens with a foreword by the central character, Robick, chief architect of the city of Urbicande, in which he [...]

The Obscure World.
Les Murailles de Samaris (1983) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the first of the stories which explores the world of Les Cités Obscures, a “counter-Earth” on the opposite side of our Sun with a continent of separate city-states, each with their own distinct architectural style. Having discovered these stories first in [...]

Paris au XXieme Siecle by Jules Verne (1994).
Following a comment I made last week in the post about the Temples of Future Religions by François Garas, I’ve decided it’s time to give some proper attention to one of my favourite comic artists, François Schuiten, a Belgian whose obsession with imaginary architecture resembles the earlier endeavours [...]

Detail of the Water Organ (1902).
Samples from a set of pictures at LUNA Commons of the wonderful water gardens at the Villa d’Este, Tivoli, Italy. Among the 164 items in the collection are plans, engravings, and photographs old and new. I’m partial to the older photos, most of which seem to be photogravure reproductions whose [...]

Two of the stunning displays created from sketches by David Lynch for the Galeries Lafayette department store, Paris. The series is entitled Machine-Abstraction-Women, and I don’t think Mr Lynch would mind too much having his description of the works translated in an extruded manner from French to English:
I was always fascinated by the spectacle of [...]