{typography} – Page 37 – { feuilleton }

Steampunk overloaded!

Yes, it’s the “S” word again, and if there was any doubt that this has been the Year of Steampunk here at Coulthart Towers, look at these recent works. And this is by no means everything I’ve been doing in this area, there’ll be further announcements later on.

The covers for KW Jeter’s novels are a pair of reprintings from UK publisher Angry Robot whose books will shortly be available in the US and Canada. Jeter is now famous—infamous, perhaps—for having given the word “steampunk” to the world in the early 1980s. This was intended as a jest after he and a couple of other writers (including a favourite of mine, Tim Powers) had written a number of science fiction novels set in the 19th century; like many light-hearted neologisms, it gained a life of its own. Angry Robot are reissuing two of these early works as a result of the ongoing steampunk explosion.

Morlock Night (1979) is a pulpy affair which sees the Morlocks from HG Wells’ The Time Machine using the Time Traveller’s vehicle to return to Victorian London and wreak no end of havoc. Infernal Devices (1987) is a rather more substantial confection involving a great deal of clockwork mechanisms (for once the clock parts are justified!), automata, fish people, and a device capable of destroying the earth. I’ve been producing a lot of engraving collage à la Ernst and Sätty recently but the technique seemed especially appropriate here as a means of illustrating works which themselves are collages of Victorian motifs.

Meanwhile, over at Tachyon Publications, there’s this cover for another Victorian adventure, two in fact, from master beserker Joe R Lansdale. Flaming Zeppelins combines a pair of comic adventures, Zeppelins West (2001) and Flaming London (2006), which feature a host of notable figures including Mark Twain, Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill Cody…and a talking seal. Publication date is November 1st.

Then from Tachyon in mid-November there’ll be Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, a 430-page anthology edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer which includes fiction and non-fiction from William Gibson, Caitlín R Kiernan, Jeffrey Ford, Cherie Priest, and many others. Also a comic strip, copious illustrations and a very full-on interior design from yours truly of which I’ll only show you the above page for the time being. Yes, that’s a mechanical ostrich but if you want to know what it’s doing there you’ll have to read the book. More about this later. And more later about The Steampunk Bible to which I’m also a contributor, a glossy, full-colour guide to the entire sub-culture which will be published next year by Abrams. By the time that appears I’ll probably be sick of the sight of clockwork parts, dirigibles, florid typefaces and Victorian decoration; I’ll be needing a good dose of Helvetica and Josef Müller-Brockmann minimalism to calm down.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Skeleton clocks
• Vickers Airship Catalogue
• The Air Ship
• Dirigibles
• More Steampunk and the Crawling Chaos
• La route d’Armilia by Schuiten & Peeters
• The art of François Schuiten
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts
• The Airship Destroyer
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls

Charles J Strong’s Book of Designs

Another gem from the cornucopia of scanned books at the Internet Archive, Charles J Strong’s Book of Designs was a style guide and motif resource for artists and amateur craftspeople tasked with the creation of advertising show cards or shop display signs. The book was first published by the Detroit School of Lettering in 1910, hence the heavy reliance on Art Nouveau flourishes which by this stage had degenerated from their Mucha-derived elegance into unbridled, and frequently undisciplined, rococo embellishments.

If a few of the designs lack Mucha’s care there are still some great examples here of generic Art Nouveau in its final days before Art Deco streamlined all those curves away. In the examples below a poster suggestion shows everyone’s favourite fin de sìecle gal, Salomé, while the final example shows one of Strong’s typeface designs. For anyone who likes the look of these pages but would prefer them in better quality, Dover Publications have a reprint scheduled for later this year.

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The Art Nouveau dance goes on forever

Catalogue for Art Nouveau Revival 1900 . 1933 . 1966 . 1974. Peacock feather not included.

Regular readers may recall my mention of the Musée d’Orsay exhibition Art Nouveau Revival which was launched late last year. I didn’t get to see the exhibition, unfortunately, but this week I finally ordered a copy of the catalogue, an expensive cloth-bound volume with essays (in French) by Philippe Thiébaut, Stephen Calloway, Irene de Guttry, Thierry Taittinger and Philippe Thieryre. Despite the ruinous postal charges incurred by the book’s weight this was worth every euro, it being the kind of polymorphous production which in solipsistic moments one can choose to believe was created solely for your own benefit.

Aubrey again, album covers from 1974.

Much of the subject matter has been explored here in various small ways, with the curators following the influence of Art Nouveau through Surrealism (mainly Dalí) to the psychedelic art of the 1960s and on into the Pop Nouveau (for want of a better term) which flourished in the first half of the 1970s. Among the familiar Aubrey Beardsley graphics and psychedelic posters there are also some pleasantly surprising inclusions, including illustrations by Philippe Jullian (yes, I’m still intending on writing about him at some point), yet more Beardsley album covers, film posters, and even some of the sillier films of the late-60s such as Casino Royale. Being a French exhibition there’s a section devoted to comic strips which includes work by Moebius, Philippe Druillet and Guido Crepax.

Sex and LSD, a spread from Playboy, 1967.

It’s common to see parallels drawn between the 1890s and the 1960s but the strange blooms of vulgarised fin de siècle style which burgeoned in the wake of psychedelia are seldom given much attention. One of the great things about this catalogue is the amount of ephemera the curators chose to include such as magazine ads and trend-chasing album sleeves. It was precisely this blend of 1890s + 1960s + 1970s I sought to capture in my recent cover for Dodgem Logic. As I said, it’s an expensive book but for anyone drawn to this aesthetic hothouse it’s also an essential purchase. Art Nouveau Revival can be ordered direct from the museum shop. Further samples follow.

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Johann Theodor de Bry’s Neiw Kunstliches Alphabet

A page from Johann Theodor de Bry’s Neiw Kunstliches Alphabet (1595) which can be found in a free PDF version here, the scans being taken from a Victorian reprint. The late, lamented Giornale Nuovo featured some of these curious letter designs in 2005. Each capital is embellished with various symbolic figures—Moses appears perched on the letter M, for example—whilst also being draped with fruit, lobsters and even insects. I used a smaller redrawing of De Bry’s letter S for one of the page designs in Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen in 2002. Probably not the use that De Bry intended but then I expect he’d be surprised that his work was still being used at all after four hundred years. Via BibliOdyssey.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Book of Ornamental Alphabets
• Paul Franck’s calligraphy
• Gramato-graphices
• John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems
• Letters and Lettering
• Studies in Pen Art
• Flourishes

Weekend links 20

Transfiguration (1952) by Sulamith Wülfing.

• Observatory posted photos of its Lovecraft art exhibition; see if you can spot my pics. Related: Write Club has more photos. Also, A Word From Our Sponsor.

• Taking the broooooaaaaad view of things: A Conversation with James Grauerholz on William S. Burroughs and Magick. Related: Beat Memories—The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg.

• Adam Curtis on BP and the Axis of Evil; how the the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company became British Petroleum and helped give Iran over to the Ayatollahs.

• The Quietus interviews Peter Christopherson (TG, Coil, etc) and Dr John.

• The Strange World of Adolf Hoffmeister at A Journey Round My Skull.

• An Artists’ Dialogue On CocoRosie’s Grey Oceans at Stereogum.

• Werner Herzog and David Lynch combine their talents.

• Jon Savage on The Residents versus The Beatles.

• BUTT magazine interviews James Bidgood.

• The Daily Drop Cap.

• The Gay Rub.

• Can on German TV in 1971.