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El Trigono de las lesiones (2010) by Cristina Francov. I:MAGE is an exhibition of occult-inspired art which opens a week on Sunday, 19th May at the Store Street Gallery, Bloomsbury, London. As exhibitions go it’s modest in scale but with an impressive roster of contributors old and new: Agostino Arrivabene, Ithell Colquhoun, Denis Forkas Kostromitin, [...]

Another animated gem, The Web (1987) is an eighteen-minute film based on Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels which dramatises the lethal duel between Flay and Swelter. Director Joan Ashworth reduces the cast to manservant, cook, and bedridden earl, no doubt for reasons of economy since the film was originally a student work. Economy or not, for [...]

The Evolution of the Cathode Ray (Radiolocation) Tube (1943). The BBC recently completed its Your Paintings project which displays online all the oil paintings in Britain’s galleries, over 210,000 works in all. I’ve glanced through the catalogue a couple of times but so far I’ve been too preoccupied to seach for many of the pictures [...]

From Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1966) by Isaac Bashevis Singer. All the obituaries of the late Maurice Sendak have focused inevitably on Where the Wild Things Are. That gives me a chance to draw attention to some less familiar Sendak drawings whose finer crosshatching naturally appeals to an inveterate crosshatcher such as myself. [...]

The Juniper Dog strained its twisted roots against an ember red sky, snarling out swarms of night moths, barking flocks of owls from its splintery jaws. It howled the sea. Spat stars. Clouds roiled and clotted through the tree dog’s teeth. Anna & the Juniper Dog was published this summer although it’s a tale which [...]

First paperback edition of Titus Groan, 1968. If you’re British then, no, it isn’t what you think. Having mentioned my hometown of Blackpool yesterday there’s one detail about the town I usually regard as an annex of Hell which, if not quite a saving grace, raises it into some lesser locus of perdition. There are [...]

Illustration by Mervyn Peake for The Sphinx by Oscar Wilde (1949). The centenary of writer, artist and poet Mervyn Peake is being celebrated this year with a number of events in the UK. Mervyn Peake: A Centenary Celebration is a small exhibition of Peake’s drawings which has been running since April at the Pallant House [...]

From Light Beyond Sound, a new series of works by Tatiana Plakhova. “The invasion philosophy of the Olympic Park strikes me as just like the invasion philosophy behind going into Iraq,” he says, “or anywhere else that you blast into, put up the fence, establish the Green Zone, explain everything, put it all into this [...]

A 1973 Ballantine edition of William Burroughs’ novel with a cover illustration from Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) by Salvador Dalí. Via the Burroughs Book Covers archive. The Sel Publishing House, Turkey, published a new translation of The Soft Machine by William Burroughs in January, an edition which is now under investigation by the Istanbul Prosecutor’s [...]

Mervyn Peake’s Caterpillar from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland finds itself used to promote High Society, an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection devoted to the long history of human drug-taking. There’s more about the exhibition here and also an accompanying book by Mike Jay from Thames & Hudson. Related: The Most Dangerous Drug: A group of [...]

The beat Engelbrecht had drawn for the early morning rise was a stretch of jet black water between the Jubilee Gasometer and the Municipal Slaughter House. A dank mist lay over the canal. The vampire bats were out in swarms. The bot-fly waltzed in virid clouds. You could hardly have had a better surrealist fishing [...]

One of a number of vintage ads and ephemeral items at this Flickr set. • From 1971: The Anthony Balch/William Burroughs/Jan Herman video experiment. • The NYT reports on World on a Wire, a neglected science fiction drama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. • “While some of the technology industry’s brightest minds were inventing the first [...]

Kieran at Sci-Fi-O-Rama was in touch recently asking me to contribute a paragraph about a favourite Roger Dean picture for this feature about the artist. The following splurge of polemic was the result, something I’d been intending on writing for a while. Since so many words would have overwhelmed the other contributions it’s being presented [...]

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 [...]

The Good Ship Ménage À Trois (2008). New York artist Joseph Cavalieri‘s stained glass work using Simpsons characters received a flurry of blogospheric attention recently. Of more interest for me is his gay-themed panels like the one above which show a different approach to the medium from that taken by Diego Tolomelli. Gormenghast (2009). And [...]

I should have mentioned this a lot sooner considering the museum sent me a copy of the exhibition prospectus. Maison d’Ailleurs is the Museum of Science Fiction, Utopia and Extraordinary Journeys in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, and their current exhibition is Lines of Flight—Mervyn Peake, the Illustrated Work. Yverdon-les-Bains is too out of the way for most [...]

Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros. “The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. [...]

Another charity shop book-raid this week netted me a copy of Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in its 1965 Pan Books edition, one of the Bond series with great covers designed by Richard Hawkey. The sight of the tiny Pan silhouette above reminded me that this logo was based on drawings commissioned from [...]

“For all the world I was led like a dancing bear” by NC Wyeth (1911). This year’s reading began with a desire to explore some of the Robert Louis Stevenson volumes in my collection which I’ve so far neglected. At the moment I’m thinking of maybe reading everything I have by RLS, having begun with [...]

Lilliput issue no. 150, December 1949. A nice selection of Ronald Searle book covers and illustrations turns up at Caustic Cover Critic. The Lilliput cover above isn’t among them, I just happened to have it lying around as a result of putting together a new edition of Maurice Richardson’s The Exploits of Engelbrecht earlier this [...]