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Cover art by Tom Chantrell. Halloween approaches so here’s a book that suits the season. Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies was published in Great Britain by Hamlyn in 1973. A large-format hardback of just over 200 pages, this was a cheap production for wide distribution, and evidently sold well: my edition from […]

• Julia Holter’s next album, Aviary, will arrive next month with a cover design bearing astrological symbols (a cryptic message?) and what looks like a grimoire page in the background, although I may be reading too much into this. Whatever the esoterics signify, the album is a double, and going by the sound of new […]

The Temple of Love (1911–24) by Herbert E. Crowley. • My film viewing in the 1980s involved a considerable amount of backtracking: watching any film noir that turned up on the TV while chasing the early works of David Cronenberg, and various “New Hollywood” classics on television or at repertory cinemas (when such things were […]

Le Répit (La Mort allaitant une chauve-souris) (1895) by Valère Bernard. • Playhouse 90 presents Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. An American TV production from 1957 starring Boris Karloff, Roddy McDowall, Eartha Kitt and others; introduced by Sterling Hayden. It’s bizarre. Acidemic goes into the detail. • Erik Davis talks to occult writer and […]

With the running out of the year it’s time to start posting some of the things I’ve been working on for the past few months. This year has been an incredibly busy one with little breathing space between projects. Last month I mentioned not having enough time to put together a decent mix for Halloween; […]

Since blogging here has become sporadic I find myself continually playing catch-up. Recent arrivals in the book department have included two art-related items that feature work of mine. The first is the catalogue for the Things To Come exhibition which ended last month at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel. When I posted photos […]

My work has appeared in a couple of foreign collections recently, each approaching popular culture from very different directions. The volume above is called Steampunk Japan Fashion Book according to a German bookseller although the title may read differently to Japanese speakers. This was published at the end of last year, and features my ever-popular […]

Some of the art from my collage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray appears on the cover of The Graphic Canon: Volume 2, published this month in a German edition by Verlag Galiani. Out next month (although possibly available now) is the same book in a Brazilian edition from Boitempo Editorial. One of the […]

Exhibition catalogue. In one of the many recent features about Leonora Carrington I noticed a mention of her Temptation of St Anthony painting from 1945 (see below). This was one of eleven works on the theme submitted by different artists for a competition staged to promote Albert Lewin’s The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947), […]

My Easter weekend was profitably spent watching True Detective again, a series I enjoyed even more the second time around. For the past year I’ve been pondering off and on the connections the series makes with the suite of weird tales that Robert Chambers published in 1895 as The King in Yellow, and also the […]

Picking up where we left off, I was thrilled to find that Micheál MacLiammóir’s one-man dramatised biography of Oscar Wilde had finally made it to YouTube. The Importance of Being Oscar was MacLiammóir’s 100-minute magnum opus, an acclaimed condensation of Wilde’s life and work first performed at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 1960. Hilton Edwards […]

Vampires: if they’ve never been very scarce they didn’t used to be quite so commonplace. The fortunes of Dracula, on the other hand, seem to have diminished in recent years following a centenary peak in 1997. The surprising spike of interest in the 1970s might explain the BBC’s decision to adapt Bram Stoker’s novel for […]

Oscar Wilde, no. 26 (1882). One of a series of photo portraits taken by Napoleon Sarony when Wilde was in New York. Every day is an anniversary for something. Among other things, October 16th 2014 is the 160th anniversary of the day that Oscar Wilde was brought to Earth in a spaceship—see Velvet Goldmine for […]

left: Dummy head by Dick Smith for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1961); right: Cover art by Michel Atkinson (aka Michel) for The Unquiet Grave (1963). Cinema in the 1970s would have been very different without Dick Smith‘s makeup artistry. Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man (1970). Marlon Brando in The Godfather (1972). Linda Blair […]

The Wilde Years (2000), a poster by Jonathan Barnbrook for an exhibition at the Barbican Centre, London. Continuing an occasional series. Recent (and not-so-recent) Wildean links. • Sander Bink writes that Beardsley-esque artist Carel de Nerée tot Babberich was in Paris in the summer of 1900, the summer of the Exposition Universelle which has been […]

Illustration from The House of Pomegranates (1914) by Jessie M. King. Continuing an occasional series. Recent Wildean links. • It’s a measure of a writer’s success if the characters or stories they create resonate sufficiently with future generations to be subject to new interpretations. Among Oscar Wilde’s contemporaries this has happened to Arthur Conan Doyle […]

This poster for Massimo Dallamano’s 1970 updating of The Picture of Dorian Gray was featured here several years ago, and it’s taken me all this time to finally discover the name of the artist responsible, Ted Coconis. Better late than never. It could be argued that the illustrations below for Nabokov and Goldman tend more […]

Dorian Gray (1968) by Jim Dine; one of a series of prints for an illustrated edition. Rainbows didn’t become a gay symbol until Gilbert Baker’s flag design ten years later. Continuing an occasional series. • “…the Public is a very curious thing; it is sometimes perverse, and even obstinate, and it has evidently made up […]

Byblis (1901) by Pierre Louÿs. Henri Caruchet isn’t in George Barbier’s league, never mind that of Alphonse Mucha whose graphic style Caruchet appropriated. I’ve not been able to find details about his life either, all that turns up is examples of his book illustration on various websites. Author Pierre Louÿs is notable for his erotic […]

Roman Polanski as Alfred in Dance of the Vampires (1967). I’ve always admired the attention to detail in Roman Polanski’s films, a quality evident not only in his careful adaptations but also in areas that lesser filmmakers might ignore. Dance of the Vampires (1967) is a good example (sorry, I refuse to call it by […]