Detail from the cover of Ambit # 40, 1969.

A teenage enthusiasm for Pop Art meant I was familiar with the paintings and collages of Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) long before I became aware of his association with sf magazine New Worlds, and his friendship with JG Ballard. Paolozzi was famously credited on the masthead of New Worlds as “Aeronautics Advisor”, a listing which impressed the relevant authorities when Brian Aldiss petitioned for an Arts Council grant and saved the magazine from collapse. Paolozzi’s work was featured in New Worlds now and then, and he provided a cover for issue 174, but it was to Ambit magazine one had to turn to see regular work by the artist.

New Worlds #174, Aug 1967.

My favouritism towards New Worlds has always led me to see Ambit as NW-lite; frequent NW contributor JG Ballard was Ambit’s fiction editor, and both stood to the side of the British literary scene, although Ambit editor Martin Bax didn’t share Michael Moorcock’s preference for pursuing generic or experimental means to Romantic or visionary ends. Quibbles aside, it’s good to see Paolozzi’s work for the magazine is now the subject of an exhibition, The Jet Age Compendium, at Raven Row, London, and also a book, The Jet Age Compendium: Paolozzi at Ambit from Four Corners Books. If you can’t see the former, the latter is priced £12.95 which strikes me as very reasonable.

The Jet Age Compendium runs until 1 November 2009. For an insight into the artist’s interests and attitudes, there’s a great Studio International interview here from 1971 with Paolozzi and Ballard talking to art critic Frank Whitford.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sculptural collage: Eduardo Paolozzi
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

Two samples from a great Flickr set of science fiction and fantasy paperback covers. Both these titles were first published in 1976 and, unlike many Flickr postings, this set gives credit to the cover artists where known. The Moorcock book is one of his Elric volumes and while it isn’t a favourite of mine, the painting by Michael Whelan certainly is. Whelan produced several Elric covers in the 1970s of which this is easily the most successful, and one of the few works by any artist after Jim Cawthorn to capture the weird inhumanity of the Melnibonéan.

The Ellison collection, on the other hand is one of his finest, with a wraparound cover by the author’s favourite artists Leo & Diane Dillon. Just last week I completed the interior design for Tachyon’s forthcoming The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction which included among a host of great stories The Deathbird by Harlan Ellison, a remarkable piece of writing and one of the best pieces in the entire book. That’s now gone off to the printer so I’ll be posting samples of the pages here shortly.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Groovy book covers
• Jim Cawthorn, 1929–2008
• Harlan Ellison: Dreams with Sharp Teeth
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

Another item brought to light during the Great Shelf Re-ordering and Spring Clean is this 1950 Lancer paperback of The Dying Earth by Jack Vance, a slim collection of six short connected stories, and another favourite book. Despite the sf label this is far more a work of fantasy (science fantasy, if you must), being tales of the bizarre and occasionally grotesque inhabitants of the last days of the earth. Magic is the order of the day, not advanced technology, although Vance hints that the book’s elaborate spells may be a higher ordering of mathematics capable of manipulating reality. I like the simple cover layout of this edition, and Ed Emshwiller’s illustration manages to be sparing yet fully representative of a key scene.

French sf portal Noosfere has recently revamped its artwork showcase and has a substantial collection of Emshwiller’s cover paintings. I’d prefer to see more of his earlier style but the collection includes some striking designs.

Sunstone (1979).

Emshwiller was a very prolific illustrator but from the 1960s on also developed his own style of experimental filmmaking, some examples of which can be found at YouTube. I’d actually seen Sunstone—a very early piece of computer animation—years ago without registering the credit. In addition there’s also Thanatopsis, a strange b&w short which is remarkably similar in tone to some of the films which William Burroughs and Antony Balch were making at around the same time.

• The genre artist | Jack Vance profiled in the NYT

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The King in Yellow
• Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers
• Clark Ashton Smith book covers
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• The World in 2030
• The art of Virgil Finlay, 1914–1971
• Towers Open Fire

The entire run of Britain’s first underground/alternative newspaper. Incredible. IT was never as flashy as Oz but ran for longer and arguably had the better contributors, among them William Burroughs. One notable feature was an avant garde comic strip, The Adventures of Jerry Cornelius, written by Michael Moorcock and M John Harrison with artwork by Mal Dean and Richard Glyn Jones. Heavyweight contributions to magazines tend to get reprinted, however, what I enjoy seeing in archives such as this is the ephemera which can’t be found elsewhere: adverts, reviews and illustrations like the one below. The site is a bit slow and it would have been good to have individual issues as PDFs but it feels churlish to complain. More archives like this, please.

Via Jahsonic.

Illustration by Stanley Mouse (1969).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Realist
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• Oz magazine, 1967-73

The first of the books I’ve been designing for Tachyon Publications appears this month. Two more are due to follow and I’m working on another at the moment; more about those titles later.

The Best of Michael Moorcock was a pleasure to be involved with not only because I’ve been reading Moorcock’s fiction for a very long time but I’ve also been fortunate during that time to get to know the writer and Linda Moorcock, his wife. Mike likes the work I’ve done in the past for Savoy Books and we did have an anthology of his favourite pieces by other writers planned for Constable & Robinson back in 2005. That book didn’t work out so this makes up for its cancellation. This is an excellent anthology, put together initially as a private enterprise by editor John Davey who managed the difficult task of compiling a collection which ranges over forty years of writing. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer came aboard as co-editors for the Tachyon edition.

I’ve been working mainly on the interior design of the Tachyon volumes (although I’ve also done the cover for Jeff VanderMeer’s forthcoming Booklife) and for this title I took a cue from Ann Morn’s cover design which features a pair of gates emblazoned with large letter Ms. The title spread above takes the letter M from the typeface used for the author’s name and multiplies that to create an equivalent set of gates for the reader to pass through. I try to play down the pyrotechnics for fiction—the words are the important thing, not the graphic design—but since this was a story collection I thought I’d try illustrating each piece using the title typography alone. Most of these are done by using a suitable typeface but for a few pieces I managed to create an arrangement that reflected the story. Behold the Man (below) is the Nebula Award-winning story of a journey back in time to find the historical Jesus. The cross shape not only relates to the Biblical theme but also implies the crossed time streams and Moorcock’s layered, cross-cut narrative.

The Best of Michael Moorcock is available now from the usual sources and received a glowing review in the Guardian. Later this month, and other work permitting, I’m hoping to make a start on what will effectively be a companion volume, Savoy’s long-delayed Into the Media Web, another collection by John Davey which this time collects the best of Moorcock’s copious essays, reviews and other non-fiction.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Designing Booklife
• The Sonic Assassins
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• An announcement redux

Panther Books paperback edition, 1968; cover painting: The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst.

If I can’t remember when I first encountered JG Ballard’s work, it’s not because I was reading him at a very early age, more that a childhood enthusiasm for science fiction made his books as omnipresent in my early life as any other writer on the sf, fantasy and horror shelves. I know that when I started to read the New Wave sf writers his work immediately stood out, not only for its originality but also for the numerous references to Surrealist painting which litter his early fiction, references which meant a great deal to this Surrealism-obsessed youth. Ballard was a lifelong and unrepentant enthusiast for the Surrealists, with repaintings by Brigid Marlin of two lost Paul Delvaux pictures prominent in one of his rooms (often featured in photo portraits). I always admired the way he never felt the need to apologise for Salvador Dalí’s excesses, unlike the majority of art critics who dismiss Dalí after he went to America. The paintings of Dalí, Delvaux, Tanguy and Max Ernst became stage sets which Ballard could populate with his affectless characters.

Once I’d encountered the New Worlds writers—Ballard, Michael Moorcock, M John Harrison, Brian Aldiss and company—and their American counterparts, especially Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delany and Norman Spinrad, there was no returning to the meagre thrills of hard sf with its techno-nerdery and bad writing. Ballard and Moorcock were the gateway drug to William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges and countless others, and I thought enough of his work in 1984 to attempt a series of unsuccessful illustrations based on The Atrocity Exhibition. It’s been an axiom during the twenty years I’ve worked at Savoy Books that Ballard, Moorcock and Harrison were (to borrow a phrase from Julian Cope) the Crucial Three of British letters, not Rushdie, Amis and McEwan. One of the books I designed for Savoy, The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson, was a Ballard and Moorcock favourite, and included appreciations of Richardson by both writers. I wish Ballard could have seen the new (and still delayed) edition of Engelbrecht but he got a copy of the earlier book. Sometimes once in a lifetime is more than enough.

• Ballardian.com
• Pages of obits and MM comment at Moorock’s Miscellany
• Ballard interview by V Vale at Arthur with an special intro by Moorcock
• Jeff VanderMeer at Omnivoracious
• Guardian | Times | Independent | Telegraph

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ballard in Barcelona
• 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• JG Ballard book covers

Patrick McGoohan as Number Six.

“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”

The Prisoner, which ran for seventeen episodes from 1967 to 1968, was the best original drama series there’s ever been on television. Period, as Harlan Ellison would say. Best because it grabbed the format of the TV adventure series with both hands and subverted the expectations of the audience and the people who were paying for it. Best because it dared to do this at a time when there was little precedent for experiment in a medium that was barely a decade old. Best because it had something important to say while still being entertaining. And best because it had Patrick McGoohan in the central role at the peak of his acting career.

Fiction can be anything but to look at what we’re offered by TV studios you wouldn’t know it. Cop shows, hospital shows, detective shows and soap operas proliferate, ad infinitum. The Prisoner came out of Danger Man, an immensely successful post-James Bond spy series which may have been popular but, McGoohan’s presence aside, has little to recommend it today. It lacked the camp bravura of The Avengers and couldn’t compete with the budgets of the Bond films. But it’s fair to say that without it McGoohan wouldn’t have had the chance to do something radical. ITC’s Lew Grade thought he was getting Danger Man 2 with better production values; what he received—to his eventual dismay—was the kind of television one would expect if the staff of Michael Moorcock’s speculative fiction magazine New Worlds had been given a fat budget and free reign. Like New Worlds, The Prisoner seized familiar genre themes but took them as a means to an end, not an end in themselves. The series borrowed from science fiction and spy thrillers—brainwashing and mind control, Cold War paranoia, the limitless surveillance and duplicity of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—and used a drama format to say something direct and personal to its audience about individual freedom, the limits and excesses of the state and the importance of being able to say “No” when the world insists that you capitulate.

Number Six by Roland Topor.

McGoohan was the driving force as well as the star. His own company, Everyman Films, produced the series for ITC, he planned everything with the writers, wrote three episodes and directed five of them himself. The Prisoner only lasted for a season and a half—cut short after Grade lost his patience—but the form was potentially endless, able to present a familiar Cold War spy story on the one hand, while having an entire episode play as a Western, on the other. In one of the later episodes McGoohan is largely absent when his mind is transferred to another man’s body and he finds himself living a new life, ostensibly a free man. (But freedom in The Prisoner is always circumscribed.) The last three episodes collapse everything that’s preceded them into intense and increasingly surreal psychodrama. Like Moorcock’s fluid character Jerry Cornelius, whose exploits were running in New Worlds while The Prisoner was being broadcast, McGoohan had found a vehicle to say what he wanted about the world using popular culture. It’s a coincidence but I’ve always found it apt that the cover illustration for Moorcock’s novella The Deep Fix (1966) included a figure obviously modelled on McGoohan’s Danger Man. The book’s tagline “Drugs took him into a nightmare world where logic ceased to exist” could be a description of a later Prisoner episode. Apt too that the first novel based on the series in 1969 was by New Worlds regular Thomas M Disch.

(James Colvin was a Moorcock nom-de-plume.)

The Prisoner was produced in the era of the social dramas of The Wednesday Play and Play for Today yet it remains relevant in a way its worthier contemporaries could scarcely manage. Social realism dates as quickly as yesterday’s news but allegory stays fresh. And it’s a dismal truth that the world of infinite surveillance has crept closer in a way that few would have imagined possible in 1968. The cameras which follow McGoohan’s Number Six everywhere are a familiar sight on Britain’s streets; a headline in yesterday’s Independent newspaper read: “Big Brother database a ‘terrifying’ assault on traditional freedoms“. McGoohan was raised in Ireland and would have appreciated the adherence of another Irishman, James Joyce, to the Luciferian cry of disobedience in Ulysses, “Non serviam!”—I will not serve. Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus defies God and his family; McGoohan’s Number Six defies everything else. That example, of the man who can “make putting on his dressing gown appear as an act of defiance”, is something we need as much now as we did in 1968. Hollywood is currently threatening a big screen version but why wait for more compromised studio product when you can go to the source. Get yourself a deep fix—it’s a masterpiece.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Thomas M Disch, 1940–2008
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

“Jim Cawthorn and I have been inseparable for over twenty-five years, sometimes to the point where I can’t remember which came first—the drawing or the story. It is his drawings of my characters which remain for me the most accurate, both in detail and in atmosphere. His interpretations in strip form will always be, for me, the best.” Michael Moorcock.

Jim Cawthorn—illustrator, comic artist and fantasy historian—died this week. Cawthorn was the first illustrator employed by Savoy Books and one of the key factors in drawing me to their doors in the early 1980s. His illustrations made their books special and his comics adaptation of Moorcock’s The Jewel in the Skull was a big influence on my early black and white work.

Mike Moorcock, Dave Britton and I seem to be in a minority in regarding Cawthorn as one of the finest fantasy illustrators of his generation. His carefully stipled drawings of the late Fifties and early Sixties are all miniature masterpieces and I don’t care how many artists attempt lavish paintings of Moorcock’s Elric character, for me the definitive representation remains the drawing used on the cover of the first edition of Stormbringer in 1965. Cawthorn was Moorcock’s illustrator of choice for many years and was involved with the Moorcock-edited run of New Worlds right from the start with his cover illustrating Ballard’s Equinox story. He also provided reviews for New Worlds, and his critical faculties were demonstrated to the full in 1987 with Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, an overview of the genre credited to Cawthorn and Moorcock for which Cawthorn himself wrote most of the entries.

I wrote in more detail about Cawthorn’s work for the Savoy site several years ago. For an overview of his career and influences, there’s Dave Britton’s interview from 1979.

Update: some extra pictures added.

Jagreen Lern and Elric (1963).

The Metal Monster (1962).

The Jewel in the Skull (1978).

Moorcock portrait 1: The Apocalyptic (1979).

Moorcock portrait 2: The Aesthetic (1979).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

“What sort of criticism is it to say that a writer is pessimistic? One can name any number of admirable writers who indeed were pessimistic and whose writing one cherishes. It’s mindless to offer that as a criticism. Usually all it means is that I am stating a moral position that is uncongenial to the person reading the story. It means that I have a view of existence which raises serious questions that they’re not prepared to discuss; such as the fact that man is mortal, or that love dies. I think the very fact that my imagination goes a greater distance than they’re prepared to travel suggests that the limited view of life is on their part rather than on mine.”

Thomas Disch castigating a science fiction readership which often regarded his work with a disdain born of narrow expectations. Disch (left), who took his own life a few days ago, was one of the New Worlds group of writers who frequently caused consternation among the kind of readers who only ever want to read about future technology. He was also much more than that, of course, and he wrote a lot more widely than most genre writers but it’s for his sf novels that he’ll be remembered. Rather than attempt another encomium I thought it far better to post a Charles Platt interview from 1979 which gives an insight into Disch’s character as a man as well as a writer. This was one of a number of interviews Platt conducted with leading sf writers during the late Seventies, published as Who Writes Science Fiction? in the UK (by Savoy Books) and Dream Makers: The Uncommon People who Write Science Fiction in the US.

Thomas M Disch by Charles Platt

New York, April 1979

NEW YORK, city of contrasts! Here we are on Fourteenth Street, walking past The New School Graduate Faculty, a clean modern building. Inside it today there is a fine museum exhibit of surreal landscape photography, but the drapes are permanently closed across the windows because, out here on the stained sidewalk, just the other side of the plate-glass, it’s Filth City, peopled by the usual cast of winos, monte dealers. shopping-bag ladies festooned in rags and mumbling obscenities, addicts nodding out and falling off fire hydrants. Fourteenth Street, clientele from Puerto Rico, merchandise from Taiwan. And what merchandise! In stores as garish and impermanent as sideshows at a cheap carnival, here are plastic dinner-plates and vases, plastic toys, plastic flowers and fruit, plastic statues of Jesus, plastic furniture, plastic pants and jackets-all in Day-Glo colors, naturally. And outside the stores are dark dudes in pimp-hats and shades, peddling leather belts, pink and orange wigs, and afro-combs… itinerant vendors of kebabs cooked over flaming charcoal in aluminium handcarts… crazy old men selling giant balloons.., hustlers of every description. And further on, through the perpetual fanfare of disco music and car horns, past the Banco Populare, here is Union Square, under the shadow of the Klein Sign. Klein’s, a semi-respectable old department store, was driven out of business by the local traders and has lain empty for years. But its falling apart facade still looms over the square, confirming the bankrupt status of the area. While in the square itself—over here, brother, here, my man, I got ’em, loose joints, angel dust, hash, coke. THC, smack, acid, speed, Valium, ludes. Seconal. Elavil!

Union Square wasn’t always like this. Michael Moorcock once told me that it acquired its name by being the last major battlefield of the American Civil War. Foolishly, I believed him. In truth there are ties here with the American labor movement; many trades unions are still headquartered in the old, dignified buildings, outside of which stand old, dignified union men, in defensive lunch-hour cliques, glaring at the panhandlers and hustlers toting pint bottles of wine in paper bags and giant, 20-watt ten-band Panasonic stereo portables blaring more disco! disco! disco!

Oddly enough we are looking for an address, here, of a writer who is known in the science fiction field for his almost elitist, civilized sensibilities. He has moved into an ex-office building that has been converted from commercial to residential status. Union Square is on the edge of “Chelsea”, which is supposed to be the new Soho, a zone where, theoretically, artists and writers are moving in and fixing up old buildings until, when renovations are complete, advertising execs and gallery owners will “discover” the area and turn it into a rich, fashionable part of town.

Theoretically, but not yet. In the meantime this turn-of-the-century, 16-storey, ex-office building is one of the brave pioneer outposts. We are admitted by a uniformed guard at the street entrance, and take the elevator to the 11th floor. Here we emerge into a corridor recently fabricated from unpainted sheets of plaster-board, now defaced with graffiti, but high-class graffiti, messages from the socially-enlightened tenants criticising the owner of the building for his alleged failure to provide services (“Mr. Ellis Sucks!” “Rent Strike Now!”) and here, we have reached a steel door provisionally painted in grubby Latex White, the kind of paint that picks up every fingermark and can’t be washed easily. There’s no bell, so one has to thump the door panels, but this is the place, all right, this is where Thomas M. Disch lives.

Mr Disch opens the door. He is extremely tall, genial and urbane, very welcoming. He ushers us in, and here, inside, it really is civilized. A thick, new carpet and a new couch and drapes and a fine old mahogany rolltop desk-and a view over Union Square, which is so far below that the dope-dealers dwindle to insignificance. It’s charming! So is Mr Disch, hospitably offering a wide variety of edible and drinkable refreshments. Not such an imaginative variety as is available from the natives in the square, but he offers them with considerably more graciousness and finesse.

New York, city of contrasts, also is city of high rents, so that even a relatively well-to-do quite-successful writer nearing forty has to resort to unlikely neighbourhoods to beat the accommodation problem. But the point is, Thomas Disch has travelled so widely and is so adept at living almost anywhere, he makes the outside environment seem immaterial. It is Disch’s nature to make himself at home by sheer willpower, never ill-at-ease or out-of-place, regardless of circumstances. Perhaps it is his tallness, perhaps it is his implacable control and elegant manners; he always seems to be both part of the environment and at the same time distanced from it, managing it with casual competence.

Similarly, in his writing: he has travelled widely, through almost every genre and technique: poetry, science fiction, nonfiction, movie scripts, mysteries, historical romances. And in each field he has made himself at home, never ill-at-ease or out-of-place, writing with the same implacable control and elegant manners.

Take, for example, his ventures into the science fiction field. He has logged quite a few years in this literary ghetto. Yet he has always remained a visitor rather than an inmate, part of the environment and at the same time distanced from it, with his own ironic perspective. This has not always gone down too well with the ghetto-dwellers themselves—the long-term, permanent-resident science fiction writers and fans. Some of them have been unhappy about an elegant aesthete like Disch “discovering” their neighbourhood and using the cheap accommodation for his own questionable ends.

Disch’s first novel illustrates the point. Science fiction readers recognized it immediately as an aliens-invade-the-Earth story, in the tradition of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and a thousand others. There was only one snag: in all the other novels of this type, Earth wins and the aliens are vanquished. In Disch’s novel (cheerily titled The Genocides) Earth loses and the aliens kill everybody. It almost seemed as if Disch were deliberately making fun of the traditional ways in which stories had always been told in the science fiction field.

Naturally, he sees it differently. “To me, it was always aesthetically unsatisfying to see some giant juggernaut alien force finally take a quiet pitfall at the end of an alien-invasion novel. It seemed to me to be perfectly natural to say, let’s be honest, the real interest in this kind of story is to see some devastating cataclysm wipe mankind out. There’s a grandeur in that idea that all the other people threw away, and trivialized. My point was simply to write a book where you don’t spoil that beauty and pleasure at the end.”

To the science fiction community, Disch’s ideas about “beauty and pleasure” seemed a bit depressing, and they accused him, and have continued to accuse him, of being a pessimistic author. He responds:

“What sort of criticism is it to say that a writer is pessimistic? One can name any number of admirable writers who indeed were pessimistic and whose writing one cherishes. It’s mindless to offer that as a criticism. Usually all it means is that I am stating a moral position that is uncongenial to the person reading the story. It means that I have a view of existence which raises serious questions that they’re not prepared to discuss; such as the fact that man is mortal, or that love dies. I think the very fact that my imagination goes a greater distance than they’re prepared to travel suggests that the limited view of life is on their part rather than on mine.”

Comments like this lead, in turn, to other criticisms—for instance, that Disch is setting himself up as an intellectual.

“Oh, but I’ve always taken it for granted that I’m an intellectual,” he replies ingenuously. “I don’t think of it as being a matter of setting myself up.

“My purpose in writing is never to establish myself as a member of a club. I don’t feel hostile to my audience, indeed I’m fond of it, but to write other than what delights me would be to condescend to my audience, and I think that would be reprehensible. I think any writer who reins in his muse for the sake of some supposed lack of intelligence or sophistication on the part of his readers is… well, that’s deplorable behaviour.”

So Disch has consistently written at a level which pleases himself, and has consistently been misunderstood by science fiction readers as a result. His novel 334, a gloomy vision of America in the future, was if anything less well-received by such readers than The Genocides, and was condemned as being even more depressing—even nihilistic.

“Well, nihilism is a pejorative that people throw out by way of dismissing an outlook,” he replies. “It was one of Agnew’s words. Agnew loved it because it means that someone believes in nothing and, of course, we know we don’t approve of people like that. But it also throws up the problem of what do you believe in. God? Is he a living god? Have you seen him? Do you talk to him? If someone calls me a nihilist I want the transcripts of his conversation with Jesus, till I’m convinced that we’re not brothers under the skin.”

And about the book 334 itself:

I think what distressed some people is that it presents a world in which the macroproblems of life, such as death and taxes, are considered to be unsolveable, and the welfare system is not seen as some totalitarian monster that must call forth a revolt of the oppressed masses. The radical solution shouldn’t be easier to achieve in fiction than in real life. Almost all science fiction presents worlds in which social reform can be accomplished by the hero of the tale in some symbolic act of rebellion, but that’s not what the world is like, so there’s no reason the future should be like that.”

Is this an argument that all fiction should be relentlessly tied to present-day realities?

“I’m not saying that every writer has to be a realist, but in terms of the ethical sensibility brought to bear in a work of imagination, there has to be some complex moral understanding of the world. In the art that I like, I require irony, for instance, or simply some sense that the writer isn’t telling egregious lies about the lives we lead.”

I reply that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing if readers look for some simplification of the eternal problems of real life, or at least a little escape from them now and again.

“People who want that are certainly supplied with it often enough. Of course there’s no reason that artistry can’t he brought to bear upon such morally simplistic material, but it remains morally simplistic, and to me it will always be a lesser pleasure than the same artistry brought to bear on morally complex material. The escapist reader wants a book that ends with a triumph of the hero and not with an ambiguous accommodation; I suppose I’m inclined to think that you can’t have it that way. I don’t know people who have moral triumphs in their lives. I just know people who lead more, or less, good lives.

“A literature that doesn’t try to mirror these realities of human existence, as honestly and as thoroughly and as passionately as it can, is being smaller than life. Who needs it?”

TOM DISCH was born in Iowa in 1940 and grew up in Minnesota, first in Minneapolis-St Paul (”Always my growing-up image of the big city”) and then in a variety of small towns. “I went to a two-room country school for half of fourth grade… finished fourth grade in the next town we moved to in Fairmont, Minnesota, which is in the corn belt…”

At the age of nine he had already started writing: “I filled up nickel tablets with science fiction plots derived from one of Isaac Asimov’s robot mystery stories. If we could find those nickel tablets I’m certain that the resemblance would be astonishing. But I think my stories were livelier even then.” He laughs happily.

“I remember a moment in tenth grade in high school, talking to my English teacher—I was always the pet of my English teachers and made them my confidants—and I envisioned two alternatives. One of them would have kept me in the twin cities on the paths of righteousness and duty (I can’t remember what that would have been, exactly), the other was to come to New York and be an Artist.

“My first job after high school, after taking some kind of test at the state employment center, was with U.S. Steel as a trainee structural steel draftsman. I stuck it out through that summer till I’d saved enough money to come to New York. Then in New York I got the lowest type of clerical jobs.

“I wanted to get into Cooper Union, to the architectural school. My idea was to be Frank Lloyd Wright. Cooper Union did accept me. Even though the tuition was free, I still had to work as well, and in the end l just collapsed from overwork and possibly from lack of real ambition to be an architect. Architects have to study a lot of dull things for a very long time and I probably wasn’t up to it.”

Disch returned to university later, but: “The only purpose I had in mind, then, for any degree I might have acquired, would have been to become an academic, and I thought it would be better to be a writer, so as soon as I sold my first story I dropped out of college.”

Supposedly, a major factor that influences people to read a lot of science fiction, and then write it, is a sense of childhood alienation. I ask Disch if he had that experience. He is skeptical:

“All young people are prone to feel alienated, because that’s their situation in life. Very often they haven’t found a career, don’t have a social circle they feel is theirs, and they feel sorry for themselves, accordingly. Certainly it’s something real that happens to you, but with luck you work your way out of it and soon your social calendar will be filled and you won’t complain about alienation any more. You’ll get married. Very few married men with children complain about alienation.”

Disch himself seems unusually gregarious, for a writer, and many of his projects have been written in collaboration with various other authors. His first collaborator was John Sladek. “We started writing together in New York in the summer of 1965, just short japes at first, and then two novels. One was
gothic which is best forgotten. The other was Black Alice.” (A contemporary mystery/suspense novel.)

“My experience of collaborating with other writers is just mutual delight. One person has a good idea and the other says, that’s great, and then what-if… It builds. Writing in collaboration with a person whose work you admire, miraculously sections of the book are done for you, it’s like having dreamed that you wrote something, it eliminates all the real work of writing.

“I’ve planned other collaborations. I’ve worked with composers on a small musical and an opera, and I just like the process of it. I would like to write for movies. Other writers complain about the horrors of dealing with directors, but if it’s a director one admires I would think that it would be exciting and if it’s not a director you admire then you shouldn’t be doing it. It would be difficult to share my own most earnest novels, but for comic writing, for instance, I should think it would be so much more exciting to write for Saturday Night Live than just to write humorous pieces for magazines however great your inspiration.”

The range of people whom Disch has worked with reflects the range of different forms of writing that he is interested in. “Part of my notion of a proper ambition is that one should excel at a wide range of tasks. I want to write opera libretti; want to write every kind of novel and story; I’ve written a lot of poetry and I will continue to do so. I foresee a pattern of alternating between science fiction novels, and novels of historical or contemporary-realistic character.”

I ask if he isn’t worried that this will give him too diffuse an image in the minds of publishers, who are generally happier if a writer can be given a single genre-label.

“Publishers do feel more comfortable with you if you are, in a sense, at their mercy. They prefer you to be limited as a writer. If you’re a science fiction writer who begins to write a kind of science fiction that isn’t to the taste of a publisher whom you’ve been working with, they will in effect say, stick to what you know best, go back and write the kind of book that has made you successful. If you are a genre writer then genre editors can dictate to you the terms of the genre. In the long term they’re asking for the death of the imagination, and a dreary sameness of invention, plots, and characters is the result.”

Since Disch has managed to avoid being typecast in this way. I ask him which matters more to him—success and recognition in the science fiction field, or outside of it.

“I would suppose that any science fiction writer would rather be successful in the big world than in the small world. The rewards are greater. Not simply financially, but the rewards of public acclaim. If the approval of your peers means anything, then the approval of more of your peers must mean more. And not all of the palates that you want to tickle, the critics you hope to please, are within the science fiction field. In fact the big judgement seat is outside of it.”

I ask if Disch’s best-known novel, Camp Concentration, was an attempt to achieve recognition outside of the science fiction field.

“Camp Concentration was a science fiction novel, I think it was probably not strong enough to stand on its own outside the genre. Not as a work of literature. It might have been marketed as a middle-brow suspense novel—some science fiction is smuggled out to the real world in that disguise—but I think the audience outside of science fiction is even more resentful of intellectual showing-off, while within science fiction there’s been a kind of tradition of it. Witness something like Bester’s The Demolished Man, which was in its day proclaimed to be pyrotechnical. Pyrotechnics are part of the science fiction aesthetic, and that’s what Camp Concentration was aiming at.

“In America the novel didn’t receive very much attention and it became the focus of resentment for some of the fuddy-duddy elements in science fiction to carp about. I never had enough success with the book to make me seem a threat and I’m not much of a self-promoter, so the book just vanished in the way that some books do. And that’s not entirely a bad thing. The kind of success that generates a lot of attention can be unsettling to the ego, and the people who have that kind of success are often encouraged to repeat it. It would have been a very bad thing if I had bowed to pressure to write another book like Camp Concentration, which was the expectation, to a degree, even in myself. For a while I wanted to write things that were even more full of anguish, and even more serious.”

Camp Concentration is, as Disch says, very serious and full of anguish. It is the diary of a character who is locked up and given a drug to heighten his intelligence; an unfortunate side-effect of the drug is that it induces death within a matter of months. The book thus presented a double challenge to Disch: he had to write the diary of a man who knows he is going to die, and he had to write the diary of a man whose intelligence is steadily increasing to superhuman levels. In a way it was a self-indulgence—a conscious piece of self-analysis—in that Disch himself is aware of his intelligence to the extent that it is something of a fetish.

While he was working on Camp Concentration, he confided to Michael Moorcock, (as Moorcock tells it), “I’m writing a book about what everyone wants most.”

To which Moorcock replied: “Really? Is it about elephants?”

“Elephants? No, it’s about becoming more intelligent.”

“Oh,” said Moorcock, “what I’ve always wanted most is to be an elephant.”

Talking to Tom Disch, I recount this anecdote, if only to check on its accuracy. Disch laughs and comments, “Well, I guess Mike Moorcock and I have both realized our secret dreams.”

© Charles Platt, 1980. Old paperback covers taken from Jovike’s great Flickr set.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

Yesterday’s book purchase was a small poetry collection from the magical year of 1967, edited by Peter Roche. Despite its Beatles cash-in title, Love, Love, Love: The New Love Poetry, not everything here is lightweight fare, Adrian Mitchell’s Peace is Milk is aimed more at the war in Vietnam than some object of affection. Among the other contributors there are the poets one would expect such as Roger McGough and Michael Horovitz, also Pete Brown who wrote lyrics for Cream and later had his own band, Piblokto. And there are contributions from Libby Houston, the wife of Mal Dean, an artist notable for his illustrations for Mike Moorcock’s books of the period and (later) some album sleeves for Pete Brown and others. Some of Libby’s poems appeared in the 50th anniversary edition of New Worlds magazine, along with an illustration by yours truly.

Contents aside, I picked this up mainly for the cover which I guessed was the work of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, aka Michael English and Nigel Waymouth, along with Martin Sharp the leading psychedelic artists in the UK during the late Sixties. This proved to be a good guess as the book can be seen on this Hapshash page and if I’d have looked closer while in the shop I’d have seen their name written in tiny letters on the purple “O”. Not a difficult guess, their swirly lettering designs are very distinctive. See the full groovy cover here.

• A Hapshash and the Coloured Coat gallery

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dutch psychedelia
• Family Dog postcards
• The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream revisited

Retroactive I (1964).

My youthful enthusiasm for art acquainted me with the name of Robert Rauschenberg (who died two days ago) earlier than most. Surrealism and Pop Art held an appeal that was immediate, if rather superficially appreciated at the time, and it was seeing works from both those movements which were the most memorable aspect of my first visit to the Tate Gallery when I was 13. Later on when I was reading JG Ballard’s stories and essays in back numbers of New Worlds, Rauschenberg was one of a handful of artists who seemed to depict in visual terms what Ballard was describing in words. In this respect Robert Hughes’s discussion of the “landscape of media” (Ballard’s common phrase would be “media landscape”) below is coincidental but significant. Retroactive I was painted a couple of years before Ballard began the stories that would later become The Atrocity Exhibition and it could easily serve as an illustration for that book.

There are and will be plenty of words written elsewhere about Rauschenberg’s work and influence. I’ll note here his inclusion in the list of gay artists at GLBTQ for his creative and personal partnership with another great Pop artist, Jasper Johns.

One of the artists (television) most affected in the Sixties was Rauschenberg. In 1962, he began to apply printed images to canvas with silkscreen—the found image, not the found object, was incorporated into the work. “I was bombarded with TV sets and magazines,” he recalls, “by the refuse, by the excess of the world … I thought that if I could paint or make an honest work, it should incorporate all of these elements, which were and are a reality. Collage is a way of getting an additional piece of information that’s impersonal. I’ve always tried to work impersonally.” With access to anything printed, Rauschenberg could draw on an unlimited bank of images for his new paintings, and he set them together with a casual narrative style. In heightening the documentary flavour of his work, he strove to give canvas the accumulative flicker of a colour TV set. The bawling pressure of images—rocket, eagle, Kennedy, crowd, street sign, dancer, oranges, box, mosquito—creates an inventory of modern life, the lyrical outpourings of a mind jammed to satiation with the rapid, the quotidian, the real. In its peacock-hued, electron-sweetbox tints, this was an art that Marinetti and the Berlin Dadaists would have recognized at once: an agglomeration of memorable signs, capable of facing the breadth of the street. Their subject was glut.

Rauschenberg’s view of this landscape of media was both affectionate and ironic. He liked excavating whole histories within an image—histories of the media themselves. A perfect example is the red patch at the bottom right corner of Retroactive I. It is a silkscreen enlargement of a photo by Gjon Mili, which he found in Life magazine. Mili’s photograph was a carefully set-up parody, with the aid of a stroboscopic flash, of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912. Duchamp’s painting was in turn based on Marey’s photos of a moving body. So the image goes back through seventy years of technological time, through allusion after allusion; and a further irony is that, in its Rauschenbergian form, it ends up looking precisely like the figures of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden in Masaccio’s fresco for the Carmine in Florence. This in turn converts the image of John Kennedy, who was dead by then and rapidly approaching apotheosis as the centre of a mawkish cult, into a sort of vengeful god with a pointing finger, so fulfilling the prophecy Edmond de Goncourt confided to his journal in 1861:

“The day will come when all the modern nations will adore a sort of American god, about whom much will have been written in the popular press; and images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of each individual painter may fancy him, but fixed, once and for all, by photography. On that day civilization will have reached its peak, and there will be steam-propelled gondolas in Venice.”

Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (1980).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Transfer drawings by Robert Rauschenberg
• Jasper Johns
• Michael Petry’s flag
• JG Ballard book covers

Previous posts about illustrators.

• Dalí in Wonderland

• The Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest

• Der Orchideengarten illustrated

• Equus and the Executionist

• Mervyn Peake at Maison d’Ailleurs

• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

• The art of Raphaël Freida

• The art of Bertha Lum, 1869–1954

• The art of George Barbier, 1882–1932

• The art of Warwick Goble, 1862–1943

• Steinlen’s cats

• Science fiction and fantasy covers

• Willy Pogàny’s Lohengrin

• Charles Ricketts’ Hero and Leander

• The art of Pamela Colman Smith, 1878–1951

• Der Orchideengarten

• The art of Ed Emshwiller, 1925–1990

• Harry Clarke’s stained glass

• Henry Keen’s Dorian Gray

• Peake’s Pan

• Pite’s West End folly

• Gandharva by Beaver & Krause

• The White Peacock

• Einar Nerman

• More Arabian Nights

• Edward William Lane’s Arabian Nights Entertainments

• John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems

• Butterfly women

• Jugend Magazine

• The art of Maxwell Armfield, 1881–1972

• Buccaneers #1

• The art of Claude Fayette Bragdon, 1866–1946

• The art of Dugald Stewart Walker, 1883–1937

• Jim Cawthorn, 1929–2008

• December and Vernon Hill

• Guy Peellaert, 1934–2008

• Last in Line by Light Syndicate

• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

• Peacocks

• The art of John Hurford

• La belle sans nom

• Alan Aldridge: The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes

• The art of Pierre Clayette, 1930–2005

• Ronald Searle book covers

• Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein

• Aubrey Beardsley’s musical afterlife

• The faces of Parsifal

• Willy Pogàny’s Parsifal

• The art of Mahlon Blaine, 1894–1969

• Pauline Baynes, 1922–2008

• Arthur Zaidenberg’s À Rebours

• San Francisco angels

• Maldoror illustrated

• The monstrous tome

• Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert

• The art of Virginia Frances Sterrett, 1900–1933

• The art of Ian Miller

• Dorothy Lathrop’s Three Mulla-mulgars

• Franklin Booth’s Flying Islands

• The art of Boris Artzybasheff, 1899–1965

• Meggendorfer’s Blatter

• Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal

• Sidney Sime and Lord Dunsany

• Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers

• The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937

• William Heath Robinson’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

• Austin Spare’s Behind the Veil

• Jessie M King’s Grey City of the North

• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring

• The art of Sascha Schneider, 1870–1927

• Dorian Gray revisited

• William Blake in Manchester

• Mervyn Peake in Lilliput

• Beardsley’s Salomé

• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

• Hugh Ferriss and The Metropolis of Tomorrow

• Petrucelli’s Christmas

• The art of Stella Langdale, 1880–1976

• The Age of Enchantment: Beardsley, Dulac and their Contemporaries

• The poster art of Richard Amsel

• Family Dog postcards

• Cain’s son: the incarnations of Grendel

• “Weirdsley Daubery”: Beardsley and Punch

• Winsor McCay’s Hippodrome souvenirs

• The art of Jessie M King, 1875–1949

• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia

• The art of George Sheringham, 1884–1937

• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem

• The art of John Bauer, 1882–1918

• Gods’ Man by Lynd Ward

• The art of Bob Pepper

• Architectural renderings by HW Brewer

• The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949

• Howard Pyle’s pirates

• Rex Whistler revisited

• The art of John Austen, 1886–1948

• The art of Patten Wilson, 1868–1928

• Fantastic art from Pan Books

• The poster art of Bob Peak

• The Illustrators of Alice

• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

• Fantazius Mallare and the Kingdom of Evil

• HP Lovecraft’s favourite artists

• The Decorative Age

• The art of Erik Desmazières

• Images of Nijinsky

• The World in 2030

• Wladyslaw Benda

• The art of Virgil Finlay, 1914–1971

• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

• The art of Rex Whistler, 1905–1944

More archive pages:
• The archive page archive

Previous posts about book covers or cover design.

• Nabokov book covers

• Netherlands decorated books

• March of the Penguins

• Science fiction and fantasy covers

• The art of Ed Emshwiller, 1925–1990

• The King in Yellow

• Samuel Beckett and Russell Mills

• Penguin science fiction

• Ma Petite Ville

• Groovy book covers

• Bugger Boy

• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

• Alan Aldridge: The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes

• Ronald Searle book covers

• The faces of Parsifal

• The monstrous tome

• Reynard the Fox

• The New Love Poetry

• Phallic worship

• The art of Ian Miller

• Recovering Bond

• Old book covers

• Pasticheur’s Addiction

• Arthur Machen book covers

• Repackaging Cormac

• Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers

• The World’s Greatest Detective

• Dorian Gray revisited

• Beardsley’s Salomé

• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

• James Bond postage stamps

• Stevenson and the dynamiters

• Decorated Russian book covers

• Russian book jackets, 1917–1942

• Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal

• Kafka and Kupka

• Philip José Farmer book covers

• Crossed destinies revisted

• Jack Kerouac book covers

• Wanna see something really scary?

• The art of Bob Pepper

• Philip K Dick book covers

• Masonic fonts and the designer’s dark materials

• Boys Own Books

• Penguin designer David Pelham talks

• Fantastic art from Pan Books

• Penguin Surrealism

• Hospital by Toby Litt

• Cormac McCarthy book covers

• Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino

• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

• Thomas Allen’s paperback art

• Perfume: the art of scent

• City of Spades

• DIY aesthetics

• Penguin book covers

• Dorothy Parker

• War of the Worlds book covers

• JG Ballard book covers

• William Burroughs book covers

• Czech book covers

• The Absolute Elsewhere

• The Hetzel editions of Jules Verne

• Gay book covers

More archive pages:
• The archive page archive

Harlan Ellison.

“You have somebody who is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.”

Neil Gaiman on Harlan Ellison, and so say all of us. The quote comes from a trailer for Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a new documentary about Ellison’s life and work which, as far as I can tell, has yet to acquire any distribution. Given Ellison’s reputation you have to wonder why it’s taken this long for someone to make a substantial film about such a great artist and natural performer.

“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman, from a 1978 portfolio by Jim Steranko.

But it doesn’t arrive a moment too soon given the quantity of recent web discussion which seems to have forgotten his huge body of work and sees him solely as a person who gets into arguments all the time. He’s always been argumentative, of course, splendidly so, and his take-no-prisoners attitude did much to shake up the conservative world of American science fiction in the late Sixties and early Seventies. As a political commentator he’s always been at the Hunter S Thompson level with a great line in witty vituperation. The filmmakers seem to have caught both sides of Ellison, the writer who doesn’t so much read as perform his texts from memory, and the tightly-wound ball of fury who won’t take shit from anyone. The film site has nearly an hour of clips to watch, including a tremendous speed-reading of Prince Myshkin, and Hold the Relish.

And while we’re on the subject, I’ll give another plug to the landmark collection of HP Lovecraft-derived art due to appear soon from Centipede Press. This features a number of my Lovecraftian works and an introduction from Mr Ellison himself.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Bradbury Building: Looking Backward from the Future
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

An unmade high-concept from Hammer Films’ early Seventies dalliance with pulp adventure, if you must know. Via Boing Boing via Jess Nevins via Airminded where we learn:

The story was along the lines of THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, with a German Zeppelin being blown off-course during a bombing raid on London and winding up at a “lost continent”-type place.

Rather like the Civil War balloon that’s blown off-course in Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island then, which ends up on Captain Nemo’s volcanic island of giant birds and insects. Of course, the mere fact that a film was never made is no obstacle for YouTube’s army of diligent mash-up artists and you can see Zeppelin v. Pterodactyls re-imagined as a 1936 Republic Serial here. (And on a pedantic professional note, an older font should have been used for the titles since Hermann Zapf didn’t design Palatino until the 1940s.)

It was another horror company, Amicus Productions, that produced The Land that Time Forgot (1975) (and its ER Burroughs-derived sequels, At the Earth’s Core [1976] and People that Time Forgot [1977]) so this Hammer concept may have been an attempt to follow Amicus’s lead and exploit the momentary flush of enthusiasm for ERB and co. Or perhaps they thought that Zeppelin movies were the next big thing after Michael York’s First World War adventure, Zeppelin, in 1971. No one in Hollywood these days would dare finance a film with a title like this. The same dumbing-down imperative that gave us Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone (because Americans can’t be trusted to know what the Philosopher’s Stone is) would no doubt want “pterodactyls” replaced by “dinosaurs” or the wording of the whole thing reduced to ZvP.

U-boat vs. dinosaurs! Illustration by Frank R Paul for a 1927 reprint of The Land that Time Forgot.

The Land that Time Forgot was scripted by Michael Moorcock and New Worlds‘ (and Savoy Books) illustrator James Cawthorn. The pair did a decent job with the story although the film as a whole is let-down by silly monster effects, the pterodactyl (or is it a pteranodon?) in this instance being a lifeless thing swinging from a crane. Moorcock and Cawthorn worked together on Tarzan Adventures which Moorcock was editing as a teenager so they appreciated the material at least. This wasn’t the only connection New Worlds had with pulp cinema, more surprisingly JG Ballard had provided a story for Hammer in 1970 with When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Hammer missed an opportunity in not hiring Moorcock for something seeing as he’d just written one of the first retro-dirigible (and pre-Steampunk) novels, The Warlord of the Air, in 1971. UK film producers had some of the best writers in the world under their noses yet could only offer them trash to work on. No wonder the British film industry went down the tubes in the Seventies after the American funding dried up.

My favourite pulp adaptation from Hammer is The Lost Continent based on Uncharted Seas by Dennis Wheatley. A typical Hammer product in the way the story is frequently preposterous yet the whole thing is made with the utmost seriousness. Amazon summarises the plot, such as it is:

This film starts out like The Love Boat on acid, as a cast of unpleasant characters, all with horrible secrets, take a chartered cargo ship to escape their troubles. Unfortunately, the leaky ship is carrying an explosive that can be set off by sea water and it sinks, stranding many characters in a Sargasso Sea populated by man-eating seaweed, giant monster crabs and turtles, and some Spanish conquistadors who think the Inquisition is still on.

Eric Porter is the ship’s captain, a very good actor who was superbly sinister and convincing as Professor Moriarty in Granada TV’s Sherlock Holmes adaptations. The Lost Continent was Wheatley’s shameless plundering of William Hope Hodgson’s Sargasso Sea tales, the book being originally written in 1938 when Hodgson was less well-known than he is today. Until the Pirates of the Caribbean films this was about the closest thing on screen to Hodgson’s world of drifting weed, lost galleons and man-eating monsters, so there you have its cult value. Just be ready with the fast forward button if you try and watch it.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Moorcock on Ballard
• Coming soon: Sea Monsters and Cannibals!
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• Druillet meets Hodgson
• Davy Jones
• The Absolute Elsewhere

People ask me now and then what I prefer working on the most, and the answer is always the same—book design. The Adventures of Little Lou, a short novel by Lucy Swan for Savoy Books turned up today from the printers and it’s a good example of why I find this kind of work so enjoyable. For a start, the printers, Anthony Rowe Ltd, always do an excellent job. One of the things which makes CD design aggravating at times is the lack of care from pressing plants when it comes to print quality. But most of all there’s the pleasure of being able to make a book a beautiful object in its own right.

For this title we used gold blocking on the pages again and endpapers patterned with a red marbling design. The gold and red complements the dust jacket, and the scarlet swirls correspond to a number of motifs in the book, from the delirium of the characters’ drug states to the quantities of blood spilled as the story progresses. Lucy’s book riffs on David Britton’s Lord Horror and Meng and Ecker characters in much the same way that some of the New Worlds‘ writers of the late Sixties riffed on Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius character, taking prior creations as a starting point for something new. This won’t appeal to a general readership; it’s vicious, offensive, scatalogical, wonderfully imaginative, downright nasty in places, and frequently very funny. But that’s okay, it’s a Savoy book, not another clunker from Jonathan Cape.

The Digger issue, August 1968.

Here’s something of major importance, The Realist Archive Project. Four complete issues online so far, with a promise of all 146 issues to be uploaded eventually. The Realist started out as a satirical magazine in the late Fifties and moved into the slipstream of the counter-culture as the Sixties progressed. Editor Paul Krassner is introduced in the RE/Search Pranks (1987) book thus:

Paul Krassner is famous for doing The Realist (1958-1974; now revived), described by OUI magazine as “the most satirical and irreverent journal to appear in America since the days of HL Mencken.” The Realist published explicit photos, outrageous cartoons, vicious satire, and extreme paranoid conspiracy theories on topics ranging from the Kennedy assassinations to Jonestown. When Mike Wallace asked him on a 60 Minutes interview about the difference between the underground press and mainstream media, he told him that Spiro Agnew was an anagram for Grow A Penis, adding, “The difference is that I could print that in the Realist, but it’ll be edited out of this program.” That prediction came true. Harry Reasoner said of Krassner that he “not only attacks establishment values; he attacks decency in general.”

During his lifetime of weird experiences and friendships with notables like Lenny Bruce and Timothy Leary, Krassner claims (among other things) to have taken LSD when he testified at the Chicago 8 trial, on the Johnny Carson show, with Groucho Marx, and with Squeaky Fromme and Sandra Good. In 1977 he became publisher of Hustler magazine for six months.

I first encountered the Realist from mentions in Robert Anton Wilson’s books (RAW was one of its writers) but, unlike UK undergrounds which often turned up secondhand, there was no way to ever see a copy over here. Hence the value of this archive. If you want an idea of Krassner’s outrageousness—which makes much of the political sniping of Private Eye seem very tame indeed—look no further than the May 1967 issue with its lead story describing Lyndon B Johnson fucking the dead John F Kennedy’s neck wound shortly before his being sworn in as president. And in the same issue there’s the notorious cartoon spread by Wally Wood depicting a host of Disney characters doing all the things that recently-deceased Uncle Walt wouldn’t allow them to do in the cartoons. That drawing was so scurrilous that it’s generally supposed Disney preferred not to sue for fear of giving it greater publicity.

The issue edited by the anarchist Diggers was altogether more serious, and the list of names involved shows a lineage connecting the Beats to the hippies:

Memo to the Reader

When Time magazine decided to do a cover story on the hippies last year, a cable to their San Francisco bureau instructed researchers to “go at the description and delineation of the subculture as if you were studying the Samoans or the Trobriand Islanders.”

Thus were they supposed to remain—a frozen fad for posterity.

But a few months ago, police rioted on Haight St. Next day, at a town hall meeting in the Straight Theater, the spectrum of reaction ranged from “Let’s have another be-in” to “We gotta get guns!” A compromise was reached: bottles painted Love were thrown at the cops.

And yet, the question remains—What is being defended?

This issue of the Realist, therefore, has been created entirely by The Diggers, in an attempt to convey the flavor and feeling-tone of a revolutionary community.

An inadequate list of the brothers and sisters whose work is represented in this document:

Antonin Artaud, Richard Avedon, Billy Batman, Peter Berg, Wally Berman, Richard Brautigan, Bryden, William Burroughs, Martin Carey, Neil Cassidy, Fidel Castro, Don Cochran, Peter Cohon, Gregory Corso, Dangerfield, Kirby Doyle, Bill Fritsch, Allen Ginsberg, Emmett Grogan, Dave Haselwood, George Hermes, Linn House, Lenore Kandel, Billy Landout, Norman Mailer, Don Martin, Michael McClure, George Metesky, George Montana, Malcolm X, Natural Suzanne, Huey Newton, Pam Parker, Rose-a-Lee, David Simpson, Gary Snyder, Ron Thelin, Rip Torn, Time Inc., Lew Welch, Thomas Weir, Gerard Winstanley, and Anonymous.

The contents herein are not copyrighted. Anyone may reprint anything without permission. Additional copies are available at the rate of 5 for $1. The Diggers have been given 40,000 copies to spread their word: free.

Many of those writers are no longer around but happily Paul Krassner is and he’s been writing regularly for The Huffington Post, the Arthur magazine weblog and other sites.

Via Boing Boing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ginsberg’s Howl and the view from the street
• Simplicissimus
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• Underground history
• Wallace Burman and Semina
• Robert Anton Wilson, 1932–2007
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer
• 100 Years of Magazine Covers
• Oz magazine, 1967-73

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #3 (1992).

Following from the post about an art forgery exhibition (and Eddie Campbell discussing his American Gothic cover for Bacchus), I thought I’d post some of my own forgeries, or pastiches as we call them when no deception is intended.

Reverbstorm was the Lord Horror comic series I was creating with David Britton for Savoy in the 1990s. The Modernist techniques of collage (as in the work of Picasso and others) and quotation (as in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land) became themes in themselves as the series developed, so it seemed natural to imitate the styles of various artists as we went along. Pastiche is also a chance to flagrantly show off, of course, and I can’t deny that this was also one of my impulses here.

Issue #3 of Reverbstorm had marauding apes as its theme, from the Rue Morgue to Tarzan and King Kong, so I had the idea of doing an ape cover in the style of the celebrated paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593) which make human heads out of fruit, flowers or animals. Easy enough to have the idea but making it work took a lot of effort and required careful sketching beforehand, something I rarely do. The painting was gouache on board, a medium I’d been using for years and this was about the last gouache work I did before switching to acrylics.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #4 (1994).

Despite admiring Aubrey Beardsley’s work for years, this was the first time I attempted to consciously imitate his style. The end result has never looked all that Beardsley-esque to me (see another attempt below) but it did produce one of my best Lord Horror drawings.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #5 (1994).

Reverbstorm #5 is the Picasso issue and the story switches drawing styles throughout using variations on different periods of Picasso’s career. The cover spread was a riff on Guernica which is a key motif in the series as a whole. This was acrylic on board, with some chopped-up postcards collaged at the top and bottom. You can see James Joyce’s head beside the bull on the left and Lord Horror and Jessie Matthews (based on the interior panel below) on the far right.

Jessie Matthews in Reverbstorm #5.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #6 (1996).

The second Beardsley pastiche with James Joyce, Jessie and Horror in masquerade costumes. The bull and horse from Guernica can be seen stipled into the background. Michael Moorcock included this drawing in the 50th anniversary edition of New Worlds magazine. (The date for this is later than the pictures below since two issues were created out of sequence, a typical piece of Savoy unorthodoxy.)

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #6 (1995).

At the end of issue 6 we see Joyce take a book down from a shelf, The Weird of Spring-Heeled Jack, written by his brother (William Joyce/Lord Horror in this mythology). The book is labelled as being illustrated by Harry Clarke which was my idea when I decided I wanted to do a Clarke pastiche. As with the Arcimboldo painting, having the idea was the easy part, the actual drawing took about two weeks to complete.

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #7 (painted 1994; issue appeared 2000).

This painting is an attempt at doing comic artist Burne Hogarth (copying his famous drawing of Tarzan astride a raging lion) in the style of fantasy artist Frank Frazetta and is acrylic on board again. I’d originally put one of my perennial black suns at the top of the picture but amended that later in Photoshop by filling it with the Reverbstorm lightning flash and a flare effect.

Baptised in the Blood of Millions (painted 1997; book published 2001).

When I came to do the cover for David Britton’s third Lord Horror novel he gave me a sketch he wanted reproduced in the style of Frazetta so I went all out with this one and did a big acrylic painting on canvas. The end result is more Frazetta-like than the Reverbstorm cover (it owes a lot to Frazetta’s Bran Mak Morn painting) and also contains some Francis Bacon-like smears which Dave was very pleased with.

The tentacles in this painting have led it to being incorporated in my Lovecraft volume, The Haunter of the Dark, along with a selection of other Lord Horror pieces including the Harry Clarke drawing. Meanwhile Reverbstorm is slowly being reworked as a single volume, other work permitting, although the completion date for that is still some distance away. Naturally, any news about it will be posted here in due course.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• T&H: At the Sign of the Dolphin
• Fantastic art from Pan Books
• Guernica, seventy years on
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

Every issue of the weekly German satire magazine—from 1896 to 1944—is available for download as a free PDF here. Amazing.

Combining brash and politically daring content, a bright, immediate, surprisingly modern graphic style, Simplicissimus featured the work of German cartoonist Thomas Theodor Heine on every cover, and published the work of writers such as Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke. Its most reliable targets for caricature were stiff Prussian military figures, and rigid German social and class distinctions as seen from the more relaxed, liberal atmosphere of Munich.

Yes, the content is in German but Simplicissimus, like Punch, featured cartoons (some in strip form) and illustrations as well. Each issue also includes a couple of pages of adverts that are fun to look at. Lots of samples from its visual contributors, including the great Heinrich Kley, here. Via Design Observer.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• 100 Years of Magazine Covers
• It’s a pulp, pulp, pulp world
• Vintage magazine art II
• The art of Heinrich Kley, 1863–1945
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records
• View: The Modern Magazine
• Vintage magazine art
• Oz magazine, 1967–73

Michelangelo’s ‘David’ (1987).

In a similar vein to the dismembered Soviet monument in the previous post, there’s the sculpture of the late, great Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005). The giant head of Invention is especially impressive when seen in situ outside London’s Design Museum, its pieces separated by the words of a Leonardo da Vinci quotation: “Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions, nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.”

It should be noted, in light of another recent post, that Paolozzi was associated with New Worlds when the magazine was at its height, credited (jokingly) as “Aeronautics Advisor” even though he had little or nothing to do with the publication aside from being friends with contributor JG Ballard. There’s a great Studio International discussion here from 1971 between Paolozzi, Ballard and critic Frank Whitford, in which they talk around the subjects of Surrealism, violence in life and the arts, and other typically Ballardian concerns.

Invention.

Portrait of Richard Rogers (1988).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• JG Ballard book covers
• Ballard on Modernism

The Singing Citadel (1970).

Michael Moorcock’s Elric books are being prepared for republication by Del Rey in the US next year. I’ve assisted with some minor parts of this preparation, including sourcing pictures from Savoy’s edition of Monsieur Zenith the Albino. (Anthony Skene’s albino anti-hero is a precursor of Moorcock’s albino anti-hero.)

Discussion of the Elric books with Dave at Savoy prompted my excavation of this battered Mayflower paperback from the retired book boxes. This slim volume collected four fantasy stories: the title piece (possibly the first Elric story I read), Master of Chaos, The Greater Conqueror and To Rescue Tanelorn…. I’d forgotten about the garishly strange cover, one of many that Bob Haberfield produced for Moorcock’s books during the 1970s. Haberfield is one of a number of cover artists from that period who worked in the field for a few years before moving on or vanishing entirely. The swirling clouds derived from Tibetan Buddhist art identify this as one of his even without the credit on the back; later pictures were heavily indebted to Eastern religious art and while technically more controlled they lack this cover’s berserk intensity. Haberfield’s site has a small gallery of his splendid paintings, including a rare horror work, his wonderfully eerie cover for Dagon by HP Lovecraft.

Searching for more Haberfield covers turned up these two examples, both part of the SciFi Books Flickr pool, a cornucopia of pictures by vanished illustrators. Browsing that lot is like being back inside the In Book Exchange, Blackpool, circa 1977. The digitisation of the past continues apace at the Old-Timey Paperback Book Covers pool and the Pulp Fiction pool. Don’t go to these pages if you’re supposed to be doing something else, it’s easy to find yourself saying “just one more” an hour later.

And in other Moorcock-related news, Jay alerts me today to the existence of an archive of New Worlds covers, something I’d been hoping to see for a long time. New Worlds was one of the most important magazines of the 1960s, mutating under Moorcock’s editorship from a regular science fiction title to a hothouse of literary daring and experiment. As with so many things in that decade, the peak period was from about 1966–1970 when the magazine showcased outstanding work from Moorcock himself, JG Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delany, M John Harrison, Norman Spinrad and a host of others. For a time it seemed that a despised genre might be turning away from rockets and robots to follow paths laid down by William Burroughs, Salvador Dalí, Jorge Luis Borges and other visionaries. We know now that Star Wars, Larry Niven and the rest swept away those hopes but you can at least go and see covers that pointed to a future (and futures) the world rejected.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer
• 100 Years of Magazine Covers
• It’s a pulp, pulp, pulp world

Image-heavy post! Please be patient.

Four designs for three bands, all by the same designer, the versatile and brilliant Barney Bubbles. A recent reference over at Ace Jet 170 to the sleeve for In Search of Space by Hawkwind made me realise that Barney Bubbles receives little posthumous attention outside the histories of his former employers. Since he was a major influence on my career I thought it time to give him at least part of the appraisal he deserves. His work has grown in relevance to my own even though I stopped working for Hawkwind myself in 1985, not least because I’ve made a similar transition away from derivative space art towards pure design. Barney Bubbles was equally adept at design as he was at illustration, unlike contemporaries in the album cover field such as Roger Dean (mainly an illustrator although he did create lettering designs) and Hipgnosis (who were more designers and photographers who drafted in illustrators when required).

Colin Fulcher became Barney Bubbles sometime in the late sixties, probably when he was working either part-time or full-time with the underground magazines such as Oz and later Friends/Frendz. He enjoyed pseudonyms and was still using them in the 1980s; Barney Bubbles must have been one that stuck. The Friends documentary website mentions that he may have worked in San Francisco for a while with Stanley Mouse, something I can easily believe since his early artwork has the same direct, high-impact quality as the best of the American psychedelic posters. Barney brought that sensibility to album cover design. His first work for Hawkwind, In Search of Space, is a classic of inventive packaging.

Update: BB didn’t work with Mouse in SF, I’ve now been told.

Hawkwind: In Search of Space (1971).

It’s fair to say that Hawkwind were very lucky to find Barney Bubbles, he immediately gave their music—which was often rambling and semi-improvised at the time—a compelling visual dimension that exaggerated their science fiction image while still presenting different aspects of the band’s persona. In Search of Space is an emblematic design that opens out to reveal a poster layout inside. One of the things that distinguishes Barney Bubbles’ designs from other illustrators of this period is a frequent use of hard graphical elements, something that’s here right at the outset of his work for Hawkwind.

This album also included a Bubbles-designed “Hawklog”, a booklet purporting to be the logbook of the crew of the Hawkwind spacecraft. I scanned my copy some time ago and converted it to a PDF; you can download it here.

The In Search of Space sleeve unfolded.

Gracious! by Gracious! (1970).

The shifting identity of Barney Bubbles means that many works such as this are omitted from listings. Gracious! was one of the first releases on the Vertigo label and the design was credited to “Teenburger”. The bold exclamation mark is printed on textured (bubbled?) card while the interior (below) featured a three-dimensional Richard Hamilton-style tableau. This band also connects Barney Bubbles and Roger Dean, another artist whose work was increasingly used by Vertigo. The second Gracious! album featured a Dean cover which kept the exclamation mark design.

Gracious! gatefold interior.

Dr Z: Three Parts to My Soul (1971).

In the 1970s even the most obscure bands could receive lavish cover treatment. This more typical design for the Vertigo label had two flaps that opened out from the centre with a heart-shaped hole cut in the middle.

Hawkwind: Doremi Fasol Latido (1972).

I hadn’t realised until I started assembling these images how much Barney’s work seemed to go through phases of influence. For the third Hawkwind album he must have been looking at the kind of superhero comic art exemplified by Jack Kirby. The Doremi cover is a black and white drawing (printed in silver ink on the original sleeve) done in the style of Kirby’s familiar reflective metal strips. The inner sleeve was even more Kirby-like although less successful, a squadron of barbarians on horseback with a sacked city burning in the distance and flying saucers drifting overhead. The fold-out poster below was free with initial pressings.

Hawkwind: Star Rats—poster with the Doremi album (1972).

Hawkwind: Urban Guerilla single ad (1973).

This artwork in this ad design was part of a series of black and white posters all created around the time of the Doremi album that still exhibited the bold influence of Jack Kirby. This particular picture, however, is lifted directly from a Lone Sloan strip by French comic artist Philippe Druillet, Les Iles du Vent Sauvage (1970). (You can see part of the drawing on this page.) I later swiped from Druillet myself so I’m not one to criticise. In fairness, the comic strip figure only had the helmet and the shield, Barney adds an elaborate sword and a new background.

Update: thanks to comments from Rebecca and Mike below, I was reminded of the title of the picture above and so was able to find the poster version and its companions. You can see all five posters here.

Fanon—Dragon Commando.

Prince Minksy’s chopper.

Edgar Broughton Band: Oora (1973).

Hawkwind: Space Ritual (1973).

The definitive Hawkwind design and one of my favourite album covers. Barney’s work had now moved away from comic books into a kind of cosmic Art Nouveau with the band’s dancer, Stacia, here presented in the style of Alphonse Mucha. The lion heads were based on a head in Mucha’s L’Emeraude from 1900. Mucha also favoured a combination of illustration with hard graphics so it’s easy to see why Barney would respond to this. Much of the Hawkwind ad art of the time features Mucha-styled borders.

Space Ritual is justly celebrated for its poster sleeve which opens out to six panels. Barney’s graphics for the interior were developments of the work he created for the Hawkwind logbook, a blend of drawn or painted graphics with “significant” photos, in this case Edwardian erotica, atomic structures, a foetus floating among stars, etc. The example below is crudely composited from the CD reissue; it was too much effort to photograph the original sleeve and it doesn’t make much difference at this size anyway.

The Space Ritual tour programme also came as a fold-out poster, featuring a pulpy sf story and pictures of the band among the Mucha flourishes. Once again, I made my copy into a PDF which you can download here.

Hawkwind: Love & Peace poster (circa 1973).

The Mucha influence continued in this promotional poster whose figure and design is based on the Champagne White Star artwork for Moet & Chandon (1899).

Hawkwind: Hall of the Mountain Grill (1974).

The most illustrational of all his Hawkwind sleeves and a picture that could easily have worked as one of his monochrome designs.

Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers: Bongos Over Balham (1974).

The sleeve for Mike Moorcock’s Deep Fix album below was (according to Moorcock) a real wooden fairground booth that Barney constructed, painted then photographed.

Michael Moorcock & the Deep Fix: New Worlds Fair (1975).

Hawkwind: The 1999 Party—tour poster (1975).

The shift of emphasis in the mid-Seventies was away from Art Nouveau towards Art Deco poster graphics, a style evident in all the 1999 Party tour artwork and the two sleeves that follow.

Hawkwind: Roadhawks (1976).

Hawkwind: Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music (1976).

The final Hawkwind design isn’t just Art Deco, it’s almost fascist, looking like a piece of Soviet propaganda art topped by a Nazi eagle. Hawkwind singer Bob Calvert spoke of the band being reorganised after this album along the lines of “a Stalinist purge” so maybe the design is appropriate.

1976 was the year of a Stalinist purge in British music as a whole. With the advent of punk Barney successfully made the transition from hippy designer to punk designer. If anything, punk gave him a new leash of life as his tremendous sleeve for the second Damned album demonstrates. His association with Stiff Records and Radar Records was the second major phase of his career after Hawkwind and gave him the opportunity to explore a range of influences from early 20th century design.

The Damned sleeve is a Kandinsky-esque portrait of the band with the group’s name spelled out using abstract shapes, an approach to album lettering he was to use for other artists as the decade progressed. I was especially taken with this album at the time and referred to it in an exam essay I had to write about album covers.

The Damned: Music For Pleasure (1977).

The very wide letter spacing used on the titles of these albums was a common feature of his Stiff designs, one of a number of habitual effects that became prevalent in work from subsequent designers.

Clover: Unavailable (1977).

Hawklords: 25 Years On (1978).

Hawkwind became Hawklords for one album and a tour in 1978. Barney was commissioned to help create the stage show and develop the vague science fiction concept of Pan Transcendental Industries around which the album was based. The result was a very up-to-the-minute presentation which the band discarded immediately afterwards. This was Barney’s last work for Hawkwind. I’ve always found this cover distinctly erotic but I doubt you want to know about that here.

Nik Turner’s Sphinx: Xitintoday (1978).

Sax player Nik Turner was thrown out of Hawkwind in the 1976 band purge but he remained friends with Barney Bubbles. When Turner came to record his solo album, Xitintoday, Barney was asked to create the packaging. The album is a concept affair based around the Egyptian Book of the Dead but Barney’s design for the sleeve and accompanying booklet avoids hippy cliches with a use of abstract graphics or arrangements of lettering; the cover design, for example, features stars made up of the word “twinkle”. The pair continued to work together for Turner’s later band, Inner City Unit.

1978 was also the year Barney was asked to help with the redesign of the NME. His new logo remained in use up to the late 80s and forms the basis of the current (degraded) logo design.

Whirlwind: Blowing Up A Storm (1978).

Ian Dury & the Blockheads: logo design (late 70s).

The association with Stiff Records led to one of Barney’s most famous works, the Blockhead logo. If he’s remembered for anything it should be for this simple, brilliant and witty graphic.

Ian Dury & the Blockheads: Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick (1978).

Ian Dury & the Blockheads: Do It Yourself (1979).

His inventiveness came to the fore again with his cover designs for Ian Dury. This sleeve was printed in twelve different versions onto real sheets of wallpaper. The design acts not only as a comment on the home improvement alluded to in the title but also a request for the purchaser to make a choice of their own among the different styles.

Radar Records logo (1978).

Elvis Costello & the Attractions: This Year’s Model (1978).

Initial pressings were made to look like deliberate misprints, showing CMYK colour bars and cutting off the letters of the artist name and title, a quirk abandoned on subsequent editions.

Elvis Costello & the Attractions: Armed Forces (1979).

The David Shepherd-style elephants on this cover do little to hint at the exceptional interior design, probably Barney’s most extravagant work since Space Ritual, and certainly its equal. The sleeve opens out to further extend the interpretation of the title and includes Mondrian and Jackson Pollock stylings among its animal-print abstractions. To save page-loading time there’s a page here where you can see the full effect for yourself. Thanks to LondonLee for the photos.

Update: Tim Niblock in the comments notes that this package was produced in association with Bazooka Graphics, France.

The Imperial Pompadours: Ersatz (1982).

Not many people know Barney Bubbles had a band. The Imperial Pompadours was Barney plus Nik Turner and other members borrowed from Inner City Unit. They recorded this one unhinged rock’n'roll album on a very restricted budget. Read The Seth Man’s review of it here.

Elvis Costello & the Attractions: Almost Blue (1981).

Work at Radar continued with covers for all the early Elvis Costello albums. Almost Blue prefigures the look of many sleeve designs that came later in the decade while Imperial Bedroom featured a painting of Barney’s pastiching Picasso (“Snakecharmer & Reclining Octopus by Sal Forlenza, 1942”). Despite his increasing success and a growing reputation among younger designers these were to be his last works. Friends say he’d always been something of a depressive and late in 1983 he evidently reached some kind of crisis and took his own life. Roy Carr wrote an obituary for the NME.

Elvis Costello & the Attractions: Imperial Bedroom (1982).

Barney Bubbles’ work is continually featured in histories of album cover design but he was more than just a cover designer. We’re overdue a decent book-length examination of his work and his influence.

Update: The book is on its way. And David Wills’ new blog features his reminiscences about art school life with Barney. Good things come to those who wait.

Update 2: Reasons to be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles by Paul Gorman was published by Adelita on December 4th, 2008. Paul Gorman writes about it here and I featured an extract here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records
• Oz magazine, 1967–73
• The lost art of sleeve design

Inevitably overshadowing this was 100 Years of Magazine Covers which author Steve Taylor very graciously had sent to me. A heavyweight book in all senses of the word, with a solid cover, thick paper stock and tremendous design by Neville Brody. Taylor navigates the overcrowded field of 20th-century magazine design with great skill, managing to cover all the principal areas of magazine as news medium, fashion journal, literary forum and vehicle of cultural transgression, whether that be the Sixties’ underground, Seventies’ punk or the disparate worlds of gay life and feminism. Illustrations range from the elegance of early Collier’s and Vogue to the garish incoherence of today’s celebrity rags such as Heat. Given such a broad field of study there are bound to be omissions; I would have liked to have seen something from the New Worlds of the late-Sixties, for example, and maybe one of the Non-Format covers for The Wire. But they got Lilliput in there which is pretty impressive considering that magazine now seems to be largely forgotten. Essential stuff.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• It’s a pulp, pulp, pulp world
• A few thousand science fiction covers
• Vintage magazine art II
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records
• View: The Modern Magazine
• Vintage magazine art
• Oz magazine, 1967–73

The (low-res) digitisation of the past continues apace on this site which is accumulating cover scans from a host of American sf and fantasy magazines. Oddly enough, I’d been looking for a place with pictures of the early Omni covers just recently, but this site didn’t come up on Google, or if it did, I missed it. I bought most of the first year’s run of Omni so it’s interesting seeing which covers I remember and which I’d forgotten about. Now, where is there a site with a complete run of New Worlds covers? Link via Strange Attractor.

And an item of contemporary magazine news:
Jonathan Barnbrook designs the latest issue of Adbusters.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A few thousand science fiction covers
• Vintage magazine art II
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records
• View: The Modern Magazine
• Vintage magazine art
• Oz magazine, 1967–73