Apr 7, 2018

Once again, I was going to post something more substantial this week but I’m still exceptionally busy, and my plans were further thwarted by the arrival in my RSS feed of this new upload at the Internet Archive. Décorations Peintes pour Devantures et Intérieurs de Magasins is a short but beautiful collection of Art Nouveau […]
Apr 1, 2018

Ways Of Seeing will be the next release by The Advisory Circle on the Ghost Box label, and with metallic gold cover art by Julian House. • “The structure came to Argento while he was tripping on some good acid, a fevered dream logic piecing everything together. [...] ‘People came running out, screaming, telling people […]
Mar 31, 2018

Searching through old emails last week reminded me that a couple of years ago I’d supplied some art for use in a steampunk-themed bar in Gran Canaria. I would have mentioned this before now but, as is often the way with freelance commissions, once the negotiations were over I dispatched the art then heard nothing […]
Mar 25, 2018

Taro Okamoto’s Tower of the Sun on the cover of an Expo ’70 guide. • Last week I was watching the restored print of Howard Brookner’s excellent William Burroughs documentary, Burroughs. Among the later scenes are shots of the writer visiting Britain in the autumn of 1982 for the Final Academy events, a visit also […]
Mar 11, 2018

Cover art by Bruce Pennington, 1974. Via Clark Ashton Smith vs Bruce Pennington. • Garçons de Joie. Prostitution masculine à Paris 1860-1960 is an exhibition running at Galerie Au Bonheur du Jour, Paris, until May. The catalogue is expensive (and seems to be in French throughout) but features a substantial amount of rare homoerotic art. […]
Mar 4, 2018

Cover art for the 1921 edition by W. Otway Cannell. • “An exiled recluse, an ancient abode in the remote west of Ireland, nightly attacks by malevolent swine-things from a nearby pit, and cosmic vistas beyond time and space. The House on the Borderland has been praised by China Miéville, Terry Pratchett, and Clark Ashton […]
Jan 21, 2018

Cover art for Outer Dark (1994) by Bill Laswell. Photography by Thi-Linh Le. • “In an era where music, among other creative endeavors, has been devalued as mere ‘content,’ freely accessed through the new digital medium, the very survival of those who create music and art and culture has been threatened. Bassist, iconic producer, and […]
Jan 7, 2018

Britain’s Royal Mint acknowledges this year’s bicentenary of the publication of Frankenstein with a commemorative £2 coin. • A trailer for The Green Fog, a film by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, which uses clips from over 200 films set in and around San Francisco to create a collage companion to (and critique […]
Dec 31, 2017

The Invisible World of Beautify Junkyards will be the next release on the Ghost Box label in March 2018. Design by Julian House. • Tantalising discovery of the week was Alphons Sinniger’s Eno (1974), a 24-minute film about post-Roxy Music Brian Eno which shows (among other things) the recording of Here Come The Warm Jets. […]
Dec 29, 2017

Art by Twins of Evil for the forthcoming blu-ray from Arrow Academy. The laziest post of the year is invariably a review of the artists/designers/photographers featured on the weekend posts, so here’s another end-of-year list for you. Scroll down to see what caught my attention over the past twelve months. Mass by Ron Mueck at […]
Dec 3, 2017

I Had Sweet Company Because I Sought Out None. Collage by Helen Adam. • Readers of The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges continue to be compelled to either illustrate the impossible archive or create virtual equivalents. The Library of Blabber by nothke is a procedural version for home computers in which each volume […]
Nov 19, 2017

Japanese (?) poster for Liquid Sky (1982). • The announcement this week of the death of Carl T. Ford, former editor of Dagon magazine, prompted a handful of memorial pieces. Dagon was notable for being a small British magazine devoted to Lovecraftian and other weird fiction (and the Call of Cthulhu games) at a time […]
Nov 16, 2017

With the running out of the year it’s time to start posting some of the things I’ve been working on for the past few months. This year has been an incredibly busy one with little breathing space between projects. Last month I mentioned not having enough time to put together a decent mix for Halloween; […]
Nov 12, 2017

Lynd Ward again, and one of his illustrations for Frankenstein (1934). • “Julio Mario Santo Domingo was a collector and visionary who filled his homes and warehouses with the world’s greatest private collection related to the subjects of drugs, sex, magic, and rock and roll: a library of more than 50,000 items…” Altered States: The […]
Oct 13, 2017

It was just over a year ago that I was asked to contribute to The Thing: Artbook, and the thing itself (so to speak) turned up in the post a few days ago. This is a large, heavyweight volume of 400 colour pages, stuffed to the slavering gills with fanged abominations (and more than a […]
Oct 8, 2017

States of Ecstasy 1 by K. Lenore Siner some of whose work may be seen in Witch-Ikon: An Exhibition of Contemporary Witchcraft Imagery at Mortlake & Company, Seattle. • Emily Temple compiles a list of “40 creepy book covers”. A shame that she (or Lithub) can’t also credit more of the artists and designers responsible. Searching […]
Oct 1, 2017

Night Out, Shibuya, a photograph by Yoshito Hasaka. One of a remarkable series. • Rixdorf Editions is a new publishing venture from Strange Flowers’ James Conway which “…aims to cast light on an era which is misunderstood to the extent that it is thought of at all. I speak of the German Empire, specifically the Wilhelmine […]
Sep 24, 2017

Male Nude, Leg Up (1952) by Horst. From a series of photo prints at Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art until 5th November. • At Bandcamp: “Tuareg guitar mixed with traditional rural folk”: Eghass Malan by Les Filles de Illighadad; “Pan dimensional spacecraft hover over ancient pyramids on worlds undreamed of”: Lemurian Dawn by Memnon Sa. • […]
Sep 17, 2017

Outward Journeys, which will be released on November 3, is the second album on the Ghost Box label by The Belbury Circle (Belbury Poly with The Advisory Circle). As before, John Foxx is a guest vocalist, and as always, Julian House provides the graphic design. • Music non-stop: Geeta Dayal in 2012 talking to Rebecca […]
Sep 8, 2017

Presenting yet another cover design for the house of furious automata, Angry Robot Books. This one won’t be published until next year but the cover has been previewed on the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog so I can show it here. Like Under the Pendulum Sun, this is another fantasy scenario with a […]