Illustration by Frank Utpatel from the 1947 Arkham House edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. “Presently I got hold of myself a bit, and marked out a pentacle hurriedly with chalk on the polished floor; and there I sat in it almost until dawn. And all the time, away up the corridor, the door of the [...]
01 First (1985). I’ve linked to so many publications at the Internet Archive I’m a little surprised it’s taken me this long to find something featuring my own work. Abrahadabra was a Dutch periodical covering subjects familiar to readers of the esoteric magazines of the 1980s (RE/Search, Rapid Eye, etc): Industrial music of the TG/Psychic [...]
Sarah and Writhing Octopus (New Wave Series, 1992) by Masami Teraoka. Strange Flowers continues to push all my buttons. For a while now I’d been intent on writing something about the strange (unbuilt) temples designed by German artist/obsessive naturist Fidus (Hugo Höppener) but I reckon James has done a better job than I would have [...]
The Magician (1926), Rex Ingram’s curious occult horror film, receives a rare screening with live music accompaniment at the Brighton Fringe Festival on Tuesday, 22nd May. The film is notable for being based on the 1908 Somerset Maugham novel of the same name whose modern-day magus character, Oliver Haddo, was modelled on Aleister Crowley. The [...]
‘Reason’ and ‘Fancy’ are my Sun and Moon. The first dispels vapours and clears up the face of things, the other throws over Nature a dim haze and may be styled the Queen of Delusions. William Beckford My thanks to Sidney Blackmore, Secretary of the Beckford Society, who posted me a copy of the latest [...]
Untitled (1978) by GR Santosh at 50 Watts. • Evertype Publishing produces a range of Lewis Carroll special editions including Ailice’s Àventurs in Wunnerland (a translation in Scots), Alicia in Terra Mirabili (a Latin version), and an edition printed in the Nyctographic Square Alphabet devised by Carroll. • This week’s bookshop animations: Type Books, Toronto [...]
A drawing from Bestiario Moderno by Domenico Gnoli (1933–1970). RIP Russell Hoban. Nina Allan celebrates a favourite writer while David Mitchell, writing in 2005, pays tribute to Riddley Walker. For me the gulf between Hoban and many of his contemporaries could be measured by his entry in the Writer’s Rooms feature the Guardian Review was [...]
Oya by Alberto del Pozo (1945–1992). Also known as Yansa, Oya is Changó’s third wife. She is the goddess of the winds and of lightning and is mistress of the cemetery gates. Passionate and brave she fights by her husband’s side if needed. Her favorite offerings are papaya, eggplant and geraniums. From Santeria at BibliOdyssey. [...]
Star City by Tomislav Ceranic. • Noted in the blogosphere this week: A Journey Round My Skull underwent a transmutation into 50 Watts; a blog devoted to artist, designer & illustrator Jessie M King; “The arts and musicks of the supranatural” at Secret Lexicon; From the Farm, Railroads, Sewing Machines & Beyond, lengthy reminiscences from [...]
That essential journal of esoteric culture, Strange Attractor, announced a fourth number this week sporting a psychedelic cover which may be the work of Julian House (no credit is given on the SA site). As to the contents: From Haiti and Hong Kong to the fourth dimension and beyond: discover the secrets of madness in [...]
Cover painting by Edgar Froese. I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim, Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge or lustre or name. HP Lovecraft, The Haunter of the Dark, 1935. It’s become traditional to do this each Halloween so here we go again with another [...]
Along the shore the cloud waves break, The twin suns sink beneath the lake, The shadows lengthen In Carcosa. Strange is the night where black stars rise, And strange moons circle through the skies But stranger still is Lost Carcosa. The King in Yellow, Act i, Scene 2. Rearranging the bookshelves this week had me [...]
Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros. “The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. [...]
Light play on the river Thame by net_efekt. …the major products of Mr. Blackwood attain a genuinely classic level, and evoke as does nothing else in literature an awed convinced sense of the imminence of strange spiritual spheres of entities. The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood’s fiction includes both novels and shorter tales, the [...]
The House of Souls (1923). Well, a handful anyway. The late RT Gault put a page of Machen cover scans on his book site which also included the excellent Absolute Elsewhere catalogue of “Fantastic, Visionary, and Esoteric Literature in the 1960s and 1970s”. The cover for The House of Souls is a very odd piece [...]
Previous posts about book covers or cover design. • Alembic and Ligier Richier • Covering Joyce • The Eighth Court • On self-imitation • In the Key of Blue by John Addington Symonds • Design as virus #15: David Pelham’s Clockwork Orange • Tentacles #1: The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ • Chute libre science [...]
Today at 17:21. This kind of view always reminds me of the opening line from The Hill of Dreams (1907) by Arthur Machen: “There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.”
Left: Stowitts photgraphed by Nickolas Muray, 1922. Hubert Julian Stowitts had a number of careers, including dancer, film actor, painter, designer and metaphysician. As a dancer he worked with Anna Pavlova, who discovered him in California in 1915 and took him on tour around the world. His statuesque figure was used by Rex Ingram for [...]
Spirit of the Night (1879). Few people recognise the name of John Atkinson Grimshaw today but anyone who’s bought a birthday or greeting card in Britain will have seen his Spirit of the Night fairy painting, one of a generic series he produced in the 1870s that remains very popular despite the painter’s obscurity. Grimshaw [...]
Der Tod als Erwürger (1851) by Alfred Rethel. It’s a fact (sad or otherwise) that a substantial percentage of my music collection would make good Halloween listening but in that percentage a number of works are prominent as spooky favourites. So here’s another list to add to those already clogging the world’s servers, in no [...]
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