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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 looking again at this old Ace paperback of Robert [...]

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. He [...]

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 latter sometimes [...]

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 by [...]

Previous posts about book covers or cover design.

• March of the Penguins

• Science fiction and fantasy covers

• The art of Ed Emshwiller, 1925–1990

• The King in Yellow

• Samuel Beckett and Russell Mills

• Penguin science fiction

• Ma Petite Ville

• Groovy book covers

• Bugger Boy

• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

• Alan Aldridge: The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes

• Ronald [...]

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 Nicolas 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 the [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

Q: What do you get when you cross analogue synthesizers, samples from obscure public information films, the graphic design of Pelican Books, Arthur Machen, HP Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, CS Lewis, Hammer horror, the Wicker Man and the music from Oliver Postgate’s animated films for children?
A: the CD releases by artists on the Ghost Box label. [...]

I’ve had the late RT Gault’s extraordinary web achive linked on my main site for years but thought it was worth giving it another plug here. The title of his site, The Absolute Elsewhere, comes from the equally extraordinary Pauwels and Bergier book, The Morning of the Magicians, a unique concoction of fact, fiction and [...]