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Midvinterblot by Carl Larsson, showing the sacrifice of King Domalde.
If you were in Brighton, England today, you could celebrate Burning the Clocks.

A Pictorial Sequence by RH Ives Gammell Based on
The Hound of Heaven (1956):
left: Panel II—I Fled Him, Down The Nights and Down The Days.
right: Panel XI—Would Clash It To.
I mentioned Francis Thompson’s poem The Hound of Heaven in the Stella Langdale post a couple of days ago. There don’t appear to be any examples of […]

Secular Europe’s Merits
| Get thee behind me, God.

Nocturne (aquatint; no date).
One of Callum’s recent book postings alerted me to the work of Stella Langdale, an artist and illustrator I hadn’t come across before. Judging from online listings her obscurity would seem to be a result of not having being as productive as some of her contemporaries, and her drawings are a deal […]

Beowulf wrestles with Grendel, Lynd Ward (1939).
There’s nothing new in pointing out Hollywood’s crimes against literature, the film business has been screwing up book adaptation since the earliest days of silent cinema. But sometimes the wound is so grievous you can’t help but speak out, in this case against Roger Avary’s Beowulf which […]

Hardly a week passes without the religious right in America getting their knickers in a twist over some new iniquity, a condition so commonplace that new outbreaks are barely worth acknowledging. However, this week’s storm in a teacup caught my attention for being art-related.
If there’s one thing certain American Christians have in common with Muslim […]

The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects by Alexandra David-Neel & Lama Yongden, City Lights Books (1972).
One of the additional pleasures of buying old books besides finding something out-of-print (or, it has to be said, something cheap) occurs when those books still possess traces of their previous owners. A recent posting on The […]

A Jihad for Love
New documentary about gay Muslims.

Biologists Helping Bookstores
“My mission: To correctly shelve pseudo-scientific junk to the appropriate parts of bookstores.”

There’s nothing new about drawing attention to the viral nature of design, whether in the repeated use of motifs and styles or the way in which typefaces breed and proliferate; Jonathan Barnbrook alludes to this process directly by calling his font house Virus.
The plate above comes from a Victorian book I bought several years ago, […]