HP Lovecraft: Tales of Horror

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Cover design by Jo Obaroswki.

More Lovecraftiana (for a change). Today’s mail included the surprise delivery of these books, a very late arrival since the book was published over a year ago. Well better late than never, I was very pleased to be involved with this one which has been published by Fall River Press, an imprint of Barnes & Noble. The plan was to reprint a small number of Lovecraft stories on colour pages accompanied by my artwork. So the book is also a reprint of many of my earlier Lovecraftian drawings, from the comic strips to more recent illustrations, with the pictures carefully cropped and, in some places, reworked a little to match the stories.

The contents:
• Introduction by Stefan Dziemianowicz
The Call of Cthulhu
The Colour Out of Space
The Haunter of the Dark
The Whisperer in Darkness
The Dunwich Horror
The Thing on the Doorstep

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The end result is very impressive. The book is solidly bound in hard covers with the cover art featuring metallic silver ink and gloss highlights. The interior design is by Gavin Motnyk who chopped up and tinted my drawings (with my approval) in a very effective manner. Many of the panels at the end of my adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu were presented with this kind of fragmentation so I was happy to see this extended to other drawings. In addition to presenting the artwork in a new way it also helped compensate for some of the shortcomings in drawings that date back to 1986. Not everything is this old, however. I sent Gavin a copy of my redrawn R’lyeh panorama which has been printed across the endpapers.

For now this is the most substantial collection of my Lovecraft artwork in print. And since it’s being distributed by Barnes & Noble it’s also relatively easy to find (although that title, Tales of Horror, is very similar to other collections). Fall River Press will be publishing another classic horror volume featuring my illustrations towards the end of the year. More about this later.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Lovecraft archive

 

Biblio-hauntology

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An invented book cover from the latest post at blissblog. Since I like fakes of this nature, especially when they’re carefully done, I had to go in search of the creator. Rachel Laine is the person responsible, and there’s more along these lines at her Flickr pages, together with many similar items from the universe next door. (I know someone who’ll appreciate all those faded magazine covers combining soft-porn photos with headlines for stories about analogue synths.) Another of the book covers is a guide to “Witches and Witch Craft”, a title whose real-life counterparts included books such as the Hamlyn guide to witchcraft and black magic from 1971. As I’m often saying, the 1970s was the witchiest decade of the 20th century.

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All of which reminded me of a couple of recent inventions of my own. One of the advantages of writing here is that I can retrieve from obscurity some of the things I’d previously cast into the Malebolge formerly known as Twitter. This impromptu creation is something I threw together after Callum J posted the cover of an old I-Spy book dedicated to “The Unusual”. (If you don’t know what the I-Spy books were—and still are—Wikipedia has the history.) The screen-grab from Whistle and I’ll Come to You is a lazy choice but I wanted to surprise Callum by reworking his cover as quickly as possible.

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A little more considered is this proposal for a set of British postage stamps dedicated to Nigel Kneale and his works. This one came about after a comment from Kim Newman that such a thing was overdue from the Royal Mail. Since I agreed I thought I could at least fake them into existence. They’re still a little incomplete—actual stamps would have a mention of Kneale on each one—but they look plausible. The artwork was swiped from a series of Quatermass book covers created by the prolific Karel Thole for Mondadori in the late 1970s. The images for the first Quatermass and Quatermass and the Pit work very well, I think, the fourth one less so. If I was doing these myself I’d try some combination of a radio telescope and a stone circle. Windows into another world; in the universe next door Quatermass is bigger than Star Wars. But we live here, not there.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Disciples of the Scorpion
Ghost Box and The Infinity Box
Llewellyn occult magazine and book catalogue, 1971
Typefaces of the occult revival
The Book of the Lost
Books Borges never wrote
Forbidden volumes

Back and forth


Another advantage of the recent WordPress upgrade means I can now do things like this. The photo is a Prague street scene that I found in a newspaper years ago which I decided to depopulate in Photoshop. In the past you could only do this with a special plugin but WordPress changed the user interface a while back from a basic write-text-and-add-media arrangement to a more complex editing system known as Gutenberg. The new editor uses CSS-style blocks which you fill with different types of “content” then shuffle around until you have a layout that you’re happy with. You can do a lot with these blocks but most of the tools that control them are hidden from view behind multiple menus and sub-menus; using the system means you first have to learn and memorise the location and function of all these hidden tools. Users of standalone installations of WordPress are a loyal bunch but there was a very negative reaction to the new editor, so much so that a plugin appeared almost immediately which reverts the interface to the former system. WordPress continues to evolve Gutenberg, however, and now provides a variety of media blocks like this picture-comparison thing. The utility is limited but it looks nice.

I’m in the anti-Gutenberg camp for the most part, especially when looking at the code that makes something like this possible. Most of the posts here are written outside WP as plain text with handwritten HTML tags; Gutenberg adds loads of new tags and instructions that clutter up the back end. I may work as a book designer but a print-style layout isn’t what I want to emulate for these pages. (And the Adobe applications I use don’t hide all their controls unless you really want them to.) Gutenberg is no doubt useful for people with big media websites using WordPress as a CMS to create layouts filled with articles, video and the like. But I’ll be sticking with the old system for now.

Comps

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The month in complimentary copies. In publishing you often get sent at least one copy of something you’ve worked on although there are plenty of occasions when this doesn’t happen. This trio turned up while I’ve been waiting for two other books to arrive, both of which I’d contributed to (one of them even has my name on the cover) but still had to request from editors. It’s always a quandary when this happens. You feel reluctant to add to somebody’s working day by making a petty request for a copy of that thing you provided some artwork for a year ago; on the other hand, one of the books I’ve been waiting for is published by an international company with a 70-year history who nevertheless didn’t have a budget to pay for all the artwork they were using. The comp was supposed to be my payment for their use of a single picture. It looks like I’ll be buying this one myself.

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Great Work of Time is a book I’ve already mentioned here, being a hardcover reprint of an award-winning novella by John Crowley. I designed the interior and the cover which has been beautifully printed by Subterranean Press on textured paper. The interiors feature two-colour printing, with various details picked out in magenta ink. A handsome edition that’s also one of the best time-travel stories I’ve read.

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Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations with Coil has also been mentioned here before. This is Nick Soulsby’s collection of interviews with Coil, a book that rescues from obscurity and potential loss a wealth of interview material—magazine features, fanzine profiles, video and tape transcripts—which chart the group’s career. I assisted in a very small way with this one, letting Nick see some of my written correspondence with John Balance. I’m also mentioned in one of the interviews which was a surprise to discover after all this time. This is a very large book which will be essential reading for all Coil cultists.

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Fifth Quarter: Derek Jarman, Keith Collins and Dungeness is a collection of personal responses to the films and art of Derek Jarman. The book has some slight relation to the Coil volume via the pictures that resemble the Jarman piece used on the cover of How To Destroy Angels. Fifth Quarter has been published by the Subtext record label to accompany Fifth Continent, an album by Alexander Tucker and the late Keith Collins, Jarman’s former partner and custodian of Prospect Cottage. I didn’t contribute to the book but I’ve done a lot of design work for Subtext who have been releasing avant-garde music now for almost 20 years. Book publishing is a new venture for them. The list of contributors to Fifth Quarter is an impressive one: Barry Adamson, Jennifer Lucy Allan, Sarah Bade, Derek Brown, Keith Collins, Garry Clayton, Peter Fillingham, William Fowler, Dan Fox, Elise Lammer, Matthew R. Lewis, James Mackay, Frances Morgan, Garrett Nelson, Stephen O’Malley, Paul Purgas, Damien Roach, Howard Sooley, Mark Titchner, Alexander Tucker, Peter Tucker, Luke Turner, Simon Fisher Turner, and Cosey Fanni Tutti.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
Great Work of Time
Man is the Animal, issue three
Derek Jarman album covers

Eco Del Universo

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Eco Del Universo, the ninth album by Mexican band Los Mundos, was released last month on Acid Test Recordings. I designed and illustrated the outer and inner sleeves for an album whose music is described on the group’s Bandcamp page as psychedelic rock. I’ve not seen a physical copy yet but the vinyl disc is available in two pressings that complement the colours of the cover.

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The brief for this one was for something based on the concrete fantasia known as Las Pozas, an overgrown park with accompanying hotel that Edward James spent many years and a great deal of money building in the Mexican jungle. James was a British aristocrat who fell for Surrealism in a big way in the 1930s, using his inherited wealth to support artists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Leonora Carrington, while creating Surrealist-styled homes for himself, first at Monkton House in West Sussex then at Xilitla in Mexico. James and his jungle resort have been recurrent subjects here so I didn’t need much encouragement to create something based on his constructions. In the past I’ve described Las Pozas as unfinished but this suggests a scheme with a final goal in mind. I don’t think this was ever James’s intention. His creations are more like very large concrete sculptures rather than architecture, even though some of them have a recognisable architectural form. Finished or not, the structures are a unique hybrid of the purposeless architectural folly—a popular indulgence for British landowners of the 18th and 19th centuries—and caprices like the Palais Idéal of Ferdinand Cheval.

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My cover art is a fantasy on the fantasy which makes James’s improvisations look a little more planned than they are by mirroring their disposition. I also crowded together several of the constructions which at Las Pozas are in separate areas of the complex. Looking at the artwork again I’m reminded of some of Roger Dean’s views which wasn’t my intention originally. I think it’s the combination of unusual architecture, layered foliage and the treatment of light and shade. If the structures weren’t outlined and the sky was a Dean-like gradient there’d be even more of a similarity. The beautiful stellar photo is from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) whose images of the cosmos are free to use so long as you give them credit. This one was by Stéphane Guisard.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Secret Life of Edward James
Palais Idéal panoramas
Las Pozas panoramas
Return to Las Pozas
Las Pozas and Edward James