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In Memory by Caitlin Hackett who describes her astonishing drawings as “contemporary mythology”. • David Lynch’s solo album, Crazy Clown Time has just been released so The Guardian last Friday let the artist/director/musician edit their G2 supplement. Xan Brooks tried to get Lynch to open up about his inspirations while elsewhere Lynch had a chat [...]

Three Seekers (2009) by Kelly Louise Judd. • Kevin Sessums talked to Elizabeth Taylor in 1997 about Tennessee Williams, her AIDS activism and related matters. Other related matters: Catholics lead the way on same-sex marriage and Mahatma Gandhi was in love with a German body-builder named Hermann. • Cray porn (the computer, that is) at [...]

The Very Best of Charles de Lint. Art by Charles Vess. Over the weekend I found the time to finally update the book design section of the site, adding new pages for most of the titles I’ve been working on recently. There’s still a couple of things missing but I’ll add those in due course. [...]

Arriving in the post this week was Lovecraft Black & White, an Italian book whose contents are spelled out in the title, black-and-white illustrations based on the work of the Providence master. Among the featured works is my 1999 rendering of Azathoth. There’s more about the book here and here. Also on the work front, [...]

Halloween in Austin, Texas this year will look and sound like this. • “Blade Runner will prove invincible“: Philip K Dick’s letter of praise to the film’s producers. Related: one of the Blade Runner designers, Syd Mead, has recently styled New York’s Bar Basque and Foodparc. • “I decided to go into fields where mathematicians [...]

The Expansion of the First Great Ornamental Age: 3 Distances (2009) by Seher Shah. • Great Female Artists? Think Karachi. “One reason for the unusually high ratio of female artists in Pakistan has to do with the fact that the art industry has not traditionally been viewed as a lucrative business by men, says South [...]

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

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

Stalker (1979). Among the new documentary films being shown at the Sheffield (UK) Doc/Fest is Igor Mayboroda’s Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side Of “Stalker”.  Behind the unwieldy title there lies an exploration of the troubled genesis of one of my cult artefacts, Andrei Tarkovsky‘s 1979 science fiction film, Stalker, a personal adaptation by the [...]

Yes, it’s been a busy year. These are books three and four respectively of the titles I’ve been designing for Tachyon Publications, and there are more on the way. Kage Baker’s The Hotel Under the Sand is a charming fantasy for children concerning the hotel of the title and its curious inhabitants, which include a [...]

Island Universe (2008). Island Universe is a new work by American artist Josiah McElheny at London’s White Cube gallery. McElheny’s recurrent use of glass and mirrors would be enough to capture my attention anyway—I particularly like the Modernity piece below—but Island Universe also features a specially-commissioned sound accompaniment by one of my favourite musicians, Paul [...]

Previous posts about book covers or cover design. • Alembic and Ligier Richier • Covering Joyce • The Eighth Court • On self-imitation • In the Key of Blue by John Addington Symonds • Design as virus #15: David Pelham’s Clockwork Orange • Tentacles #1: The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ • Chute libre science [...]

Forever Changes (1967) by Love. Art by Bob Pepper, design by William S. Harvey. Following yesterday’s post about Philip K Dick covers (and Erik Davis’s appraisal of the DAW cover), I decided to check out Bob Pepper’s work a bit more and it quickly became obvious I should have joined the dots with this particular [...]

650 Philip K Dick covers here although no thumbnails for ease of browsing. Interesting seeing how many publishers have tried to bracket Dick as a typical science fiction writer when many of his books are marginal sf at best. Then there’s the curiosity of the translated title, Substance Mort for A Scanner Darkly being one [...]

If only Philip K Dick was still around John Patterson explains.

Wasted talent John Patterson Friday July 14, 2006 The Guardian If you’re making a serious movie about drugs, it doesn’t hurt to assemble a cast that knows whereof it collectively speaks. And for his adaptation of A Scanner Darkly, Philip K Dick’s unsettling 1977 masterpiece about drugs, fractured identity, paranoia and betrayal, Richard Linklater has [...]

This year sees the 20th anniversary of the publication of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. This landmark comic book, one of the few to deserve the designation “graphic novel”, remains a particular favourite of mine, and one that still excites today for its consummate command of the comics medium. The following is a [...]