The Voyage of the Pequod

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American illustrator Everett Henry (1893–1961) created several maps based on classic American novels but The Virginian and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn lack the epic, globe-trotting qualities of Moby-Dick, one of the few novels where almost every scene takes place in a different part of the world. The linear nature of the voyage also aids Henry’s design with its graded colours and suitably bloody culmination. The use of vignettes in literary maps reminds me most of the charts drawn by Pauline Baynes for Tolkien’s books but there are plenty of other examples, some of which may be seen at VTS.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales
Jan Saenredam’s whale
The Whale again
Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick
Pauline Baynes, 1922–2008

Compass roses

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Compass rose by John Speed (1610).

Be still, my beating heart… Every so often this graphic designer has been known to complain that there isn’t a decent resource for those cartographic details known as compass roses. Well today I hit the motherlode with the discovery of Alte Schiffskompasse und Kompassteile im Besitz Hamburger Staatsanstalten (1910) by Albert Schück at the Internet Archive. Schück’s book is a small study of the evolution of the compass card from crude diagram to the elaborate creations seen here, bedizened with astrological figures or divided into degrees. The plates are exactly the kind of thing I’ve been after for years, not that I need them for any particular purpose but—given that I fetishise these things—it’s good to have them to hand.

Part of the obsession can be traced to the compass rose on John Speed’s map of Great Britain and Ireland (above). My teenage bedroom walls included among their pictures a facsimile of Speed’s map printed on some peculiar plasticised paper which (as I recall) was supposed to make it look an antique print. When drawing maps of my own I’d usually copy Speed’s compass rose, and familiarity with the device meant that I started searching them out whenever I saw another old map. Also on the bedroom wall was Pauline Baynes’ map of Middle Earth which includes a compass rose of its own.

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BibliOdyssey posted a nice selection of Speed maps recently, all of them hand-coloured (my reproduction was black-and-white). Speed’s compass rose for the Isle of Man makes the island appear to be the centre of the world. Also at the Internet Archive is a similar study to the Schück, The Rose of the Winds: The origin and development of the Compass-Card (1913) by Silvanus P Thompson. This is more useful if your interest is in the actual history of the cards since the diagrams are a lot less extravagant. Among other things Thompson refers to Schück’s volume in a note about the origin of the fleur-de-lys figure as a compass fixture. “Rose of the Winds” refers to the very earliest compass devices in which directions were marked not with North, South, East and West but with whatever the local names were for the winds at sea.

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A profusion of Peake

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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 for doing so now is twofold: firstly I’ve been re-reading the books, and secondly some Gormenghast-related news emerged this week which gives this post an additional relevance.

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Fuchsia by Mervyn Peake.

The set of Peake paperbacks which Penguin published in 1968 (and their subsequent reprints) were the first editions of Peake’s trilogy which I encountered so I can’t help but regard them as the ones, the only copies I could countenance reading. That may change, however (see below). I’ve no idea how scarce the boxed edition is but the books are reprintings from 1970 so I presume Penguin put out a boxed gift set to make the most of Peake’s posthumous success. I always liked the presentation which is the standard Penguin Modern Classics format of the period, it leaves to you how much you want to regard the books as works of fantasy or simply novels of a rather grotesque and highly imaginative reality. Titus Groan‘s sketch of a glowering and thoroughly unglamorous Fuchsia was a daring choice for a cover intended to lure a newer, younger audience to Peake’s work. The drawing says a great deal about the author’s unsentimental attitude towards his creations; compared to the florid and often delicate covers of the fantasy books being published by Ballantine in the late Sixties (a series which included the Gormenghast trilogy), it seems shockingly unpleasant.

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Pauline Baynes, 1922–2008

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Pauline Baynes, who died earlier this week, was for a long while the only Tolkien illustrator of note. Her work was approved by Tolkien himself but faded from view as the JRRT spin-off industry began to expand in the late Seventies and other artists quickly crowded the field, many of whom lacked her subtlety and sympathy for the material. It was her artwork which Allen & Unwin used on their single-volume edition of Lord of the Rings and in the late Sixties they also produced a poster of her Middle Earth map (above; complete version here). That poster hung on my bedroom wall and fascinated me with its view of the now over-familiar characters and the vignette details of various locations.

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Those vignettes, such as her tiny rendering of Sauron’s Dark Tower, seemed at the time a perfect summation of Tolkien’s world and I still prefer her hulking Barad-dûr to the spiny monolith seen in Peter Jackson’s films. Her friendship with Tolkien led to a similar commission for maps and illustrations from CS Lewis and it’s as the illustrator of the Narnia books that she’s most celebrated. I never read Lewis’s work, and came to Lord of the Rings late, so the infatuation with this brand of heroic fantasy swiftly gave way to the ambivalent moralities of Michael Moorcock‘s Elric, Fritz Leiber‘s Lankhmar and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. Her work wouldn’t have suited those writers but for Tolkien and Lewis she was ideal.

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The Fellowship of the Ring from the Middle Earth map.

One of the newspaper obituaries notes:

It was somewhat to her chagrin that she developed a reputation over the years as an illustrator of mostly Christian works and, to redress the balance, one of her last creations (her “children” as she called them) was a series of designs for selections from the Qur’an, scheduled for publication in 2009.

These days Charles Williams is the writer who interests me still from the Oxford group known as “the Inklings”, of whom Tolkien and Lewis were the most famous members. Williams was also a Christian propagandist but his use of fantasy was more sophisticated and, in the extraordinary Many Dimensions (1931), he too managed to depart from the Christian sphere by blending HG Wells-style science fantasy with Islamic mysticism.

Brian Sibley wrote a Pauline Baynes obituary for The Independent and his blog features an excellent overview of her life and work.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Mervyn Peake in Lilliput