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A poster design by Yusaku Kamekura. More here, via A Journey Round My Skull.
First of all this week, there’s a new interview posted which I gave last year to Crows ’n’ Bones magazine. The replies skate around the usual subjects (Cthulhu et al) and you also find out why I don’t think design and illustration [...]

Binding by James Brockman for The Special Bindings of Gwasg Gregynog (2004).
Two examples from a stunning collection of contemporary bookbindings at the Guild of Book Workers’ website. These are the more traditional leather bindings but some of the others play with the form of the book in a variety of inventive ways. Thanks to Thom [...]

Cover art by Coker.
We had Shock Headed Peters walking through Sodom yesterday so this novel from 1971 seems like a fitting follow-up. The eye-catching title is no doubt an allusion to Byron’s description of Turkish baths as “marble palaces of sherbet and sodomy”, an epithet which one imagines sent generations of sweet-toothed Uranians trekking to [...]

• Two covers from a new range of Penguin reprints for the Aids awareness fund (RED), all of which are based around quotes from the books in question. Non-Format’s stylised extract concerns the blazing red of the Count’s eyes while Coralie Bickford-Smith plays some Tom Phillips games with the text of The Secret Agent. The [...]

Millionaire Households and their Domestic Economy (1903).
More Art Nouveau cover designs, this time by celebrated American designer Margaret Armstrong (1867–1944) whose life and work is documented here. The University of Rochester has examples of her work, as does the Atheneum of Philadelphia and the University of Alabama’s Publisher’s Bindings pages, the latter being an incredible [...]

The author at home in his Bunker.
When I was writing last August about Yony Leyser’s new Burroughs documentary William S Burroughs: A Man Within I mentioned Howard Brookner’s 1983 film, Burroughs, a 90-minute study of the writer’s life and work that as a film biography remains definitive. Brookner was fortunate to capture all the surviving [...]

Browsing various bookbinding sites this week turned up a gorgeous cover design I hadn’t seen before by the great Will Bradley (1868–1962). The Beardsley influence is unmistakable, of course, and more pronounced than one usually sees in Bradley’s work. Richard Le Gallienne is a familiar name to scholars of the London fin de siècle scene [...]

Sometimes it pays to have an unusual name… Ritual is a 1967 novel by David Pinner which has been claimed on many occasions to be the original source for the story which Anthony Shaffer wrote as The Wicker Man. An illustrator named Peter Edwards was responsible for the cover graphic and possibly the hand-drawn type [...]

The previous post in this series showed Flandrin’s Jeune Homme Assis au Bord de la Mer (1836) being used as a book cover illustration and here it is again, confirming once again how easily the painting fits the world of homoerotica whatever the original intention of the artist. I hadn’t come across this book before [...]

Bellgrove, young Titus and Barquentine by Mervyn Peake. Case designed by Robert Hollingsworth.
I’d thought about posting the covers of my boxed set of Gormenghast paperbacks a couple of years back when there was a flurry of blogospheric attention being given to Penguin cover designs…thought about it then never got round to it. The reason for [...]

These science fiction cover galleries are becoming so ubiquitous it hardly seems worth cataloguing a new discovery. However… This pair are from the George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection at the University of Buffalo Libraries:
The UB Libraries’ George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection includes over 30,000 pulp fiction books and magazines. A selection [...]

Design by John Constable, painting by Oliver Bevan (1971).
James Pardey was in touch again this week with news of his a book cover site which follows his earlier (and justly praised) Art of Penguin Science Fiction. The new site The Art of Fontana Modern Masters presents the abstract cover designs for Fontana’s collection of pocket-sized [...]

The final post of an exceptionally productive year arrives with 2010 already shaping up to be just as busy and stimulating work-wise. In 2009 I designed at least 12 books (or was it 13? I’ve lost count…), 8 or 9 book covers, several CDs and many one-off commissions, as well as producing that calendar. If [...]

Pages from Styles of Ornament (1904), a collection of ornamental designs by Alexander Speltz. This is one of a great collection of books from the Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture at the University of Wisconsin. I only found their collection today so I’ve yet to take a detailed look at the [...]

Bibliothèque Libertine edition (1996).
The quintessence of bliss can, therefore, only be enjoyed by beings of the same sex… Teleny
More Wildeana, and yes, it’s that painting again… Teleny is an authorless and explicitly homoerotic novel often attributed to Oscar Wilde although what evidence there is regarding its creation points to it being the work of several [...]

One of my Cthulhu portraits as it appears in Image Swirl, a new Google feature-in-search-of-a-purpose. Yes, I own a portion of the Googleverse, or the Googleverse owns a portion of me; the latter seems more likely. As well as being the cover of my Lovecraft volume, that picture appeared earlier this year on a reprint [...]

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1907).
I finished reading Neil McKenna’s excellent biography recently, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, a book which makes an ideal companion to Richard Ellmann’s 1987 life of Wilde. Whilst reading about the two trials I remembered that among five pages of digitised Wilde volumes at Archive.org there’s a 1906 book, [...]

Flowers are the sexual organs of plants, which may have been what designer David Pelham had in mind when he created this cover for the Penguin debut of Nabokov’s densely-written and erotic novel, Ada in 1970. (Butterfly orchids also feature in the text, of course.) The Russian maestro has been unavoidable lately on account of [...]

left: Over kunst en kunstenaars (1923); right: Over literatuur (1924).
A few examples from a collection of gorgeous Art Nouveau and Art Deco cover designs.
The books cover the period 1893–1939 and contains bindings in the Nieuwe Kunst and Art Nouveau styles by contemporary artists working in the Netherlands such as Jozef Cantre (1890–1957) and Jan Toroop [...]

Untitled (1963).
One of a small number of pictures from a recent exhibition of work by American photographer Emil Cadoo (1926–2002) whose nude studies and often homoerotic themes were controversial in America of the Fifties and Sixties but welcomed in France, as was often the case at that time.
In April 1964, all 21,000 copies of the [...]