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One of A Pair of Peacocks (2012) by Feanne. • Jonathan Barnbrook reveals his package design for the new David Bowie CD. The Barnbrook studio has also designed the catalogue for the forthcoming V&A Bowie exhibition. And there’s more (don’t worry, it’ll be over soon): Jon Savage on When Bowie met Burroughs. • “Witches have [...]

Weird Tales, October 1933. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. • Michael Moorcock’s novels are being republished this year by Gollancz in a range of print and digital editions. Publishing Perspectives asks Is Now a Perfect Time for a Michael Moorcock Revival? • Related: Dangerous Minds posted The Chronicle of the Black Sword: A Sword & Sorcery [...]

RIP Donna. People who know me well are usually surprised when I tell them I used to go disco dancing. It didn’t happen a lot but in the summer of 1977 I was 15 and used to get taken out by my mother and her new husband to a cabaret spot called the Planet Room [...]

Kraken from Ernie Cabat’s Magical World Of Monsters (1992) at Monster Brains. “I think for a lot of people who don’t read pulp growing up, there’s a real surprise that the particular kind of Pulp Modernism of a certain kind of lush purple prose isn’t necessarily a failure or a mistake, but is part of [...]

The Arcimboldo Effect again. An undated postcard from the image section of A Virtual Wunderkammer: Early Twentieth Century Erotica in Spain. “I took George Clinton and Bootsy Collins to the Battle Station for the first time, and they left feeling like they’d just had a close encounter,” said the bassist and music producer Bill Laswell, [...]

Tilda Swinton in The Last of England (1988). John Dee turned up in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee after scenes from an earlier script about the Elizabethan magus were grafted onto the punk dystopia. Jarman’s career was to be littered with these unrealised projects, the strangest of which was Neutron, an apocalyptic science fiction film he was [...]

Ad Astra (1907) by Akseli Gallen-Kallela. • Andres Serrano’s works are photo prints so you can’t damage an exhibition item the way you can with a painting. That didn’t stop Catholic protestors in France attacking a copy of Piss Christ on Monday. By coincidence, Dave Maier had posted an essay about Serrano’s work a few [...]

Hand In Glove (1973) by The Smiths, 7″ single. This celebrated pair of buttocks turned up in the inbox this week, courtesy of a news mail from the Manchester District Music Archive announcing their Queer Noise website, an online exhibition exploring LGBT music and club culture in Greater Manchester. It was just over a year [...]

That essential journal of esoteric culture, Strange Attractor, announced a fourth number this week sporting a psychedelic cover which may be the work of Julian House (no credit is given on the SA site). As to the contents: From Haiti and Hong Kong to the fourth dimension and beyond: discover the secrets of madness in [...]

Flower Me Gently (2010) by Linn Olofsdotter. • “Many of Moorcock’s editorials are published here, and they still make exhilarating reading. Then, as now, Moorcock set his face against a besetting English sin: a snobbish parochial weariness, an ironic superiority to the frightful oiks who have started filling up the streets. You can almost hear, [...]

Transfiguration (1952) by Sulamith Wülfing. • Observatory posted photos of its Lovecraft art exhibition; see if you can spot my pics. Related: Write Club has more photos. Also, A Word From Our Sponsor. • Taking the broooooaaaaad view of things: A Conversation with James Grauerholz on William S. Burroughs and Magick. Related: Beat Memories—The Photographs [...]

• Watch the trailer for the newly-restored version of Fritz Lang’s masterwork, Metropolis. • My cover design for Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch was voted best cover in the 2010 Spinetingler Awards. • Figment announces the 2nd Annual Figment Album Cover Design Contest. The judge this time round is William Schaff. • Two interviews at The Quietus: [...]

The White Album by Flickr user Fab.C. April 17th is Record Store Day in the UK and the US, a celebration of the importance of small record shops. In the spirit of this {feuilleton} encourages you to show some love to your local music merchant if you can. There’s a website for the US side [...]

Own a copy of Arthur #7 (October 2003) with my swirling cover pic featuring cosmic jazz maestro Sun Ra. Lots of good stuff inside, details here. • Spinetingler Magazine announced their nominees the 2010 Spinetingler Award this week. Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch is one of the titles in the Best Novel category while my cover for [...]

A reminder that the Manchester District Music Archive‘s Queer Noise event (for which I designed posters and flyers) takes place this Saturday. Join us on Saturday 23rd January 2010 at The Deaf Institute for a one-off celebration of gay music in Manchester. The line-up includes: DJs: Dave Kendrick (Paradise Factory) • Jayne Compton (Club Brenda) [...]

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 [...]

Two recent pieces of work which were being created at the same time so they share some similarity of style (and the same baroque flourish). Queer Noise is a music-related event taking place in Manchester (UK) next month. Music journalist Jon Savage will be leading the discussion and some may recognise the event title as [...]

Skull Vision by Michael Ayrton (1943). The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art: great title for an exhibition, a shame that it’s all the way down in Cornwall at Tate St Ives. This group exhibition takes its title from the infamous 1962 book by St Ives artist Sven Berlin. It will explore the [...]

A design for life | Jon Savage on the history of the Smiley symbol: Watchmen, Acid House and beyond.

1 Top Class Manager is a book bearing the subtitle “The notebooks of Joy Division’s manager, 1978–1980″ published this week by Anti-Archivists, Manchester. I’ve been working on the design for this on and off since March although we actually started putting it together this time last year. Rob Gretton, manager of Joy Division and later [...]