Edgar Allan Poe – Page 10

Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrated Poe

Halloween approaches. Edgar Allan Poe illustrators are legion—some of the better ones appeared here a couple of years ago (see the links below)—but I’d not seen these lithographs by Hugo Steiner-Prag (1880–1945) before. Steiner-Prag was an ideal illustrator for Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem so it’s a pleasure to see him addressing Poe’s poems. All the prints are from a collection at the Google Art Project which includes one of the Golem illustrations plus a set for The Tales of Hoffmann.

Spirits of the Dead.

The Sleeper.

To Zante.

The Raven.

Continue reading “Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrated Poe”

Burt Shonberg’s Poe paintings

House of Usher (1960): Vincent Price and Mark Damon.

This post ought to have followed the one in January about the sinister portraits glimpsed in Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires. I still don’t know who was responsible for those paintings but the artist who created the equally outré family portraits in Roger Corman’s House of Usher (1960) was credited for his work. Burt Shonberg (1933–1977) was a friend of Corman’s who had to produce the six portraits at speed (the entire film was shot in fifteen days) so the results are sketchier than they might have been in a production with a bigger budget. I always liked the anachronism of these pictures, the way they look very much of their time; the effect is a jarring one that adds a note of much-needed strangeness to Corman’s otherwise sparse interiors.

Shonberg was a curious artist, the gallery page on his website shows a progression from Picasso-style early works in the 1950s to his own brand of mystical psychedelia. Some of his paintings from around the time of House of Usher have that stained-glass fragmentation one finds in the work of Leo & Diane Dillon from the same period. Shonberg’s biography says Corman used more paintings in The Premature Burial (1962) but I don’t have a copy of that to hand and haven’t found any examples. There’s also the detail that Shonberg was involved for a while with Marjorie Cameron, herself an artist who appeared as the mysterious “Water Witch” in another AIP production, Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide, a year after House of Usher.

Continue reading “Burt Shonberg’s Poe paintings”

Whirlpools

This was a surprise. My first thought on seeing the cover for Ethel Archer’s “book of verse”, The Whirlpool, was that its swirling waters were borrowed from Harry Clarke’s typically astonishing illustration for A Descent into the Maelström by Edgar Allan Poe. The problem there is that the Ethel Archer book was published in 1911 while Clarke’s first collection of Poe illustrations didn’t appear until 1919. The cover for the Archer book was by Ethel’s husband, Eugene Wieland, the publisher of Aleister Crowley’s Equinox periodical/occult treatise, and also the publisher of this volume. Crowley provided an introduction to the book. Given these occult associations it’s possible that Harry Clarke might have seen a copy of this. Clarke’s work appeared in Austin Spare’s own occult periodical, The Golden Hind, and he wasn’t averse to producing occult art of his own. This isn’t to say that Clarke necessarily took anything from the Archer book—sometimes a whirlpool is just a whirlpool—but it’s not outside the bounds of possibility.

There’s a copy of Ethel Archer’s book currently on sale at eBay, together with some original drawings by Eugene Wieland. The cover above came via John Eggeling’s Flickr page of rare book covers. The Poe illustration is via 50 Watts.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Sapphire Museum of Magic and Occultism

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder

A great title. As usual I came across this whilst searching for something else. Something about this was familiar but I haven’t read the book, and I suspect it will be one of those where the title proves a lot more evocative than the narrative. The author was a Canadian writer, James De Mille (1833–1880), and this novel of all his works is the most well-known for its predating more famous fantasy novels by H. Rider Haggard. Wikipedia has a précis:

The satiric and fantastic romance is set in an imaginary semi-tropical land in Antarctica inhabited by prehistoric monsters and a cult of death-worshipers called the Kosekin. Begun many years before it was published, it is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and anticipates the exotic locale and fantasy-adventure elements of works of the “Lost World genre” such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot, as well as innumerable prehistoric world movies based loosely on these and other works. The title and locale were inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s Ms. Found in a Bottle.

The illustrations are by Gilbert Gaul from the story’s serialisation in Harper’s Weekly in 1888. The best one shows a ride on a huge pterodactyl-like creature called an athaleb that makes me think of the ride on the shrowk in David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, albeit without the erotic fervour of Lindsay’s episode. Fervour or no, the road to Lindsay’s philosophical weirdness begins with early novels such as this. De Mille’s book may be browsed here or downloaded here.

Continue reading “A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder”

The Royal Natural History by Richard Lydekker

The second surprise of the weekend came, as in the best Lovecraftian tradition, with the chance discovery of a small sheet of paper, a reminder from the librarian when I was at sixth form college to return three overdue books. This was an odd survival from my schooldays since I kept hardly anything from that period. One of the books was this volume, The Royal Natural History (1894), vol. 1, sec. 2, written by Richard Lydekker with engraved illustrations by a variety of artists. I said goodbye to higher education when I quit sixth form after a year; the interval there was miserable but the place did have a very good library in which I spent a lot of time reading instead of attending classes. Many of the books there were better than those in the town library—my first sight of James Joyce’s Ulysses was on those shelves—and included a small number of older titles which were in surprisingly good condition for school books.

What’s nice about tracing this book is finding the title of one of those volumes whose engravings I found so fascinating and whose identity I’ve wondered about for years. The pictures are all excellent renderings, far better than the illustrations in a set of similar books I own which are forty years older and where the animals tend to be goggle-eyed comical things. Although this was the one I borrowed I suspect the library may have had more in Lydekker’s series since I recall one depicting fish and other marine creatures. The copies here are from the Internet Archive, of course, where they have a complete set that I’ve yet to look through. (There are twelve books in the set.) I wondered at first why I’d borrowed a book about the larger mammals until I saw the picture of a lynx below which I remember using as reference for a drawing. The Lydekker and the purchase a year later of Wilfried Sätty’s illustrated Edgar Allan Poe is where my engraving obsession really took off.

Continue reading “The Royal Natural History by Richard Lydekker”