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Collage by Jeneleen Floyd. • “…slowly, block-by-block, pedestrians are starting to take back the streets.” Wayne Curtis on the hazards of being a pedestrian in a world of cars. • Michael Hann looks back at LA’s Paisley Underground, and also talks to some of its key members. • Meighan O’Toole interviews JL Schnabel about her [...]

Current reading is Alembic (1992), a curious novel by Timothy d’Arch Smith whose publishings prior to this were all non-fiction, among them a study of the Uranian poets, a bibliography of Montague Summers, and The Books of the Beast, one of the many books about Aleister Crowley. Alembic reflects some of these interests and blends [...]

First editions of Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). I like Peter Mendelsund’s book cover designs so it’s good to find the designer given the opportunity to provide new covers for James Joyce. Mendelsund’s blog post announcing the news mentions nothing about his intentions, instead we have a reminiscence about Ireland à la Molly Bloom, [...]

Mid-January and here’s the first book cover design of the year, and another title for Angry Robot. This is the fourth book in Mike Shevdon‘s Courts of the Feyre series; since I’d already provided the three earlier books with a uniform design it didn’t take long to create this one. I’ve been very pleased with [...]

The Time Machine (1960). The turning over of the calendar from one year to the next makes this day the ideal moment to write something about HG Wells’ celebrated story. Having re-read The Magic Shop before Christmas I decided to refresh my reading habit—lapsed these past months due to pressure of work—by revisiting more of [...]

The Magic Shop (1964). I discovered this TV adaptation by accident while looking for something else (more about the something else tomorrow). The Magic Shop is a 45-minute drama directed by Robert Stevens in 1964 for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Writer John Collier adapted a script by James Parish that’s loosely based on the short [...]

Or where Angry Robot leads, HarperCollins follows… The Law of Divine Compensation by Marianne Williamson is published today in the US by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins, and if the cover looks similar to Mike Shevdon‘s recent edition of Sixty-One Nails it’s because I designed both of them. Harper’s contacted me earlier this year asking [...]

Presenting some of the cover art and interior illustration from 2011 which won me the World Fantasy Award for best artist in Toronto on Sunday. (The complete awards list is here.) It was a surprise to be nominated, and even more of a surprise to win since working in different areas—book, music, comics—is never a [...]

It’s not exactly the most appropriate moment to be recommending an exhibition in New York given the chaos in the city following the recent hurricane. However… Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets has been running at MoMA since August, and will continue into early 2013. A copy of the catalogue turned [...]

I probably overspent a little on this charity-shop purchase, the third edition (published 1918) of In the Key of Blue by John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), a personal selection of writings first published in 1893. First edition copies sell for over a thousand pounds so this was an opportunity to acquire something close to the original [...]

Design by David Pelham (1972). Continuing an occasional series. Pity the poor designer who has to create a new cover for Anthony Burgess’s novel when David Pelham’s Penguin cover—created in haste forty years ago—is more visible than ever. Pelham’s design is a familiar sight on these pages but it’s also an increasingly familiar sight elsewhere, [...]

Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1945. Illustration by Lawrence (Sterne Stevens). Following last week’s revelation of Lovecraftian horror, I thought it might be worth demonstrating just how much the tentacle-menacing-a-ship scenario is owned by William Hope Hodgson. The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907) is one of Hodgson’s lesser novels, overshadowed by the cosmic horrors of [...]

…the growths of that garden were such as no terrestrial sun could have fostered, and Dwerulas said that their seed was of like origin with the globe. There were pale, bifurcated trunks that strained upwards as if to disroot themselves from the ground, unfolding immense leaves like the dark and ribbed wings of dragons. There [...]

La Perspective Curieuse (1663) by Jean François Nicéron. From Curious Perspectives at BibliOdyssey. • 1612 Underture is a forthcoming album by The Eccentronic Research Council and Maxine Peake which extends the electronics + occult concept to encompass Kraftwerk and the Pendle Witches. The Quietus has a review of their album, and an interview and report [...]

La Jungle Nue (A Feast Unknown, 1974). Illustration de Alain Le Saux. Chute libre means “free fall” in French, and here refers to an imprint of French publisher Champ Libre that from 1974 to 1978 reprinted a series of science fiction titles under that name. The imprint is notable for a number of reasons, not [...]

Design by Hector Haralambous. The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a [...]

Back at the fin de siècle with this study by Octave Uzanne of book cover design in the 1890s. L’art dans la décoration extérieure des livres is over four hundred pages of very varied designs, from covers for popular novels to the state of the art by usual suspects Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Ricketts et al. [...]

Detail from Assassination in the Night (c. 1600?) by Monsù Desiderio. Yesterday’s post looked at some of the past cover designs for M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books. This post makes a few suggestions for how they might be presented in the future. Since these are mostly covers that I’d like to see they’re not necessarily [...]

The Pastel City (New English Library, 1971). Illustration by Bruce Pennington. There are writers’ writers, of course, and M. John Harrison is one of those. He moves elegantly, passionately, from genre to genre, his prose lucent and wise, his stories published as sf or as fantasy, as horror or as mainstream fiction. […] His prose [...]

I always liked these paperback covers, a very of-their-time series published by Corgi Books in the UK from 1969 to 1970. A sea of metallic silver ink surrounded the paintings by Bruce Pennington. Seeing them together makes me wish I had the full set. Mr. Electrico was a beautiful man, see, because he knew that [...]