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An illustration by John Kettelwell for The Story of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp (1928). • “The strain in everything I write, of not being taken with the bounteousness of humankind, was also the attitude of both my parents.” Jonathan Meades talking to James Kidd about his forthcoming memoirs. • 7 Trumps From the Tarot Cards […]

Éditions Gallimard, France, 1960. Yesterday’s post proved popular so it seemed worthwhile taking another look at the book which birthed Planète magazine. The main problem The Morning of the Magicians presents for an art director is how to encapsulate such wildly diverse contents in a cover design. To judge from the examples here, most people […]

Planète was a French magazine of “Fantastic realism” which ran throughout the 1960s. I’ve never seen a copy but sight of the immediately recognisable covers has always fascinated because this was the magazine established in the wake of the huge success of The Morning of the Magicians (1960), a unique “Introduction to Fantastic Realism” by […]

The Chimera (1867) by Gustave Moreau. It’s no easy task to catalogue all the chimeras that proliferate between the numerous examples in the work of Gustave Moreau to those produced before the First World War. Consider this a sample, then, and a pointer to further research. Several of these artists—Malczewski, Ernst, Brauner—returned to theme many […]

Chimera (1923). One of the many commendable things about Dreamers of Decadence (1971) by Philippe Jullian is the use of the figure of the chimera to describe the impulse that drove the development of Symbolist art in the late 19th century. A chimera is a fabulous, hybrid creature which is also a metaphor for an […]

My thanks once again to Sidney Blackmore for sending me this new publication from The Beckford Society. Conversations with Beckford reprints in facsimile Cyrus Redding’s memoirs of William Beckford, a series of essays which were published in 1844 after Beckford’s death. Of particular interest to this folly enthusiast is a chapter entitled The Tower of […]

My thanks once again to DR Tenge for notifying me of a new post of drawings by French artist Gilles Rimbault. More marvellous work that this time tends to the metamorphic rather than the erotic. No details as to date or provenance but considering how little there is of Rimbault’s work online it’s good to […]

Posters by Jay Shaw for Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England which receives a US release this month. • Alvin Baltrop’s Gay New York: “the clandestine activities taking place under New York piers between 1975 and 1986″. AnOther samples some of the work on display at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool. Meanwhile, BUTT has some […]

The pulp fiction of the early 20th century favoured remote or uncharted islands as locations for the bizarre and the fantastic; in isolated jungles all manner of savage and grotesque behaviour could take place out of sight of the civilised world. Islands are secure from interference; they can be visited by accident or intention, and […]

The Outsider (1956), 1963 edition; The Occult (1971), 1973 edition. The cover of the 1973 UK paperback of Colin Wilson‘s mammoth overview of occultism can still be offered as a pinnacle of hyperbole. The book itself is a very serious and informative study but its success set Wilson on a path as a writer about […]

Viriconium (Millennium/Gollancz, 2000). Painting: 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Cover of Eye no. 86 vol. 22, 2013, a type special. Detail from 1970s Letratone brochure, overprinted by character from the Marsh stencil alphabet. The new edition of Eye magazine includes my essay on the evolution and aesthetics of steampunk. In the same issue Rick Poynor’s feature on the prints of Eduardo Paolozzi mentions a […]

Yet more illustrations from John Dickson Batten, the pages this time being from Celtic Fairy Tales (1892), and More Celtic Fairy Tales (1895). Once again, both books were written by Batten’s regular collaborator Joseph Jacobs. As is often the case where less familiar stories are concerned, they yield some striking imagery.

More from illustrator John Dickson Batten with pages from two further collaborations with writer Joseph Jacobs, English Fairy Tales (1890), and More English Fairy Tales (1894). The latter (on the lighter paper below) are much better than the earlier set. The second book also includes The Hobyahs, a surprisingly violent story about a gang of […]

Continuing the Cocteau theme, this fascinating film remains (for the time being) unavailable in a better copy despite its artistic all-star cast. 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1957) can be regarded as a follow-up to Hans Richter’s Surrealist anthology Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947), the directorial credit this time being shared […]

One of Jonathan Andrew‘s photos of coastal bunkers and concrete defences from the Second World War. In 2006 JG Ballard looked at the way these structures embody the functional nature of Modernist architecture. • “Utamaro, whose prints of famous courtesans were regarded as the very models of sober beauty by 19th-century Western collectors, in fact […]

This one has been a long while gestating. Evan J. Peterson asked me late last year to contribute a cover to a new edition of Seattle’s Gay City anthology which he was editing with Vincent Kovar. In May this year the anthology successfully covered some of its production costs with a Kickstarter fund, and the […]