As you might expect, Archive.org has a lot of Alice in Wonderland adaptations, including a silent film version whose poor picture quality makes any attempt to watch it a chore. Among the many books in their collection one of the best is this illustrated edition from 1907 by Charles Robinson, brother of the equally talented William Heath. The full-page illustrations are especially good for their swirling embellishments, and I like the way he establishes the playing card motifs very early on. But the PDF version of the book also shows his inventive page layouts with narrow vignettes cutting through the text and the margins featuring tiny figures running about. The colour plates aren’t so impressive but his black-and-white work makes up for that.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937
• The Illustrators of Alice

Another illustrated Shakespeare and another Archive.org PDF. Lucy Fitch Perkins’ adaptation dates from 1907 and while her colour work in this volume is distinctly bland, her ink drawings are styled with some tasty Art Nouveau flourishes. Puck with bat wings is an unusual touch.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arthur Rackham’s Midsummer Night’s Dream
• A Midsummer Night’s Dadd
• William Heath Robinson’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

Something for the Summer Solstice, the whole of Arthur Rackham’s Shakespeare at Archive.org. Rackham’s paintings are classics of the period but for me William Heath Robinson’s black and white drawings are the superior renderings of this story. Happily you can see that book as well.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Midsummer Night’s Dadd
• William Heath Robinson’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

Poe by Harry Clarke.

Happy birthday Edgar Allan Poe, born two hundred years ago today. I nearly missed this anniversary after a busy weekend. Rather than add to the mountain of praise for the writer, I thought I’d list some favourites among the numerous Poe-derived works in different media.

Illustrated books
For me the Harry Clarke edition of 1919 (later reworked with colour plates) has always been definitive. Many first-class artists have tried their hand at depicting Poe’s stories and poems, among them Aubrey Beardsley, Gustave Doré, Arthur Rackham, W Heath Robinson and Edmund Dulac; none complements the morbid atmosphere and florid prose as well as Clarke does. And if it’s horror you need, Clarke’s depiction of The Premature Burial could scarcely be improved upon.

Honourable mention should be made of two less well-known works, Wilfried Sätty’s The Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe (1976) and Visions of Poe (1988) by Simon Marsden. I wrote about Sätty’s collage engravings in Strange Attractor 2, and Sätty’s style was eminently suited to Poe’s work. Marsden’s photographs of old castles and decaying mansions are justly celebrated but in book form often seem in search of a subject beyond a general Gothic spookiness or a recounting of spectral anecdotes. His selection of Poe stories and poems is a great match for the photos, one of which, a view of Monument Valley for The Colloquy of Monos and Una, was also used on a Picador cover for Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

Recordings
These are legion but among the outstanding one-off tracks I’d note two poems set to music, Dream Within a Dream from Propaganda’s 1985 album, A Secret Wish, and The Lake by Antony & The Johnsons. The latter appeared on the landmark Golden Apples of the Sun compilation and also on Antony’s own The Lake EP.

Among the full-length works, Hal Willner’s 1997 2-CD collection Closed on Account of Rabies features lengthy readings set to music from a typically eclectic Willner line-up: Marianne Faithfull, Christopher Walken, Iggy Pop, Diamanda Galás, Gavin Friday, Dr John, Deborah Harry, Jeff Buckley (one of the last recordings before his untimely death) and Gabriel Byrne. Byrne’s reading of The Masque of the Red Death is tremendous and the whole package is decked out in Ralph Steadman graphics.

Antony Hegarty appears again on another double-disc set, Lou Reed’s The Raven (2003), a very eccentric approach to Poe which I suspect I’m in the minority in enjoying as much as I do. An uneven mix of songs and reading/performances, Reed updates some Poe poems while others are presented straight and to often stunning effect by (among others) Willem Defoe, Steve Buscemi, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Amanda Plummer and Elizabeth Ashley.

Films
Once again, there’s too many films but The Masque of the Red Death (1964) has always been my favourite of the Roger Corman adaptations, not least for the presence of Jane Asher, Patrick Magee and (behind the camera) Nicolas Roeg. I wrote last May about the animated version of The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA. That adaptation, with narration by James Mason, is still on YouTube so if you haven’t seen it yet you can celebrate Poe’s anniversary by watching it right now.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA
• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

Among the legions of Poe adaptations for film and television, IMDB lists 21 versions of The Tell-Tale Heart. The UPA version from 1953 is a rare moment of seriousness from a company more well-known for its Mr Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing cartoons. This has long been one of my favourite Poe adaptations, not least for James Mason’s pitch-perfect narration. (A quote from this was later sampled by Scorn on the track Night Tide from their Evanescence album.) The animation avoids being too cartoony by adopting an allusive blend of Hollywood-style Surrealism and Expressionist design of the kind more usually seen in live action dream sequences of the period. Paul Julian was the designer, Pat Matthews the animator and Ted Parmelee the director.

Animator Michael Sporn has two pages of frame grabs, including some composites which show the full extent of scenes panned over during the film.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Harpya by Raoul Servais
• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

I was rather aggrieved a few weeks ago when I found a copy of James Whitcomb Riley’s The Flying Islands of the Night (1913) at Archive.org. Nice to find a free copy of a rare book but the grievance came as a result of an intention to write something about its illustrator, Franklin Booth (1874–1948), and post a picture or two. It turns out that the scanned copy available is complete but all the colour plates have been removed, probably stolen during its career as a library volume. Riley’s story is a piece of light fantasy which might well have been forgotten by now if it wasn’t for Booth’s incredible illustrations; as a result it’s the illustrations that make the book worth seeking out.

Booth’s penmanship from Franklin Booth: American Illustrator.

Happily, and by coincidence, Mr Door Tree at the essential Golden Age Comic Book Stories has uploaded scans of his own in the past few days. Beautiful stuff and easily the equal of Booth’s contemporaries in Britain such as Charles and William Heath Robinson, Edmund Dulac et al. Booth’s colour work resembles similar watercolour book illustration of the period but his black & white work was quite unique, being done in a pen style derived from his boyhood interest in engraved magazine illustrations. His careful use of hatched lines went on to influence later American illustrators including Roy Krenkel, Mike Kaluta, Bernie Wrightson and others. Golden Age Comic Book Stories has an earlier posting featuring one of Booth’s pen drawings here and a page of Mucha-esque women here.

• Bud Plant’s Franklin Booth page
• Franklin Booth: American Illustrator

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

I wasn’t planning on featuring W Heath Robinson again so soon but I couldn’t resist posting some extracts from his 1914 edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, another great PDF download from the scanned books at Archive.org. I have a few of these illustrations in a WHR monograph but I didn’t realise the book as a whole was so good. The Robinson brothers had a remarkable mastery of space in their work, no doubt derived from Beardsley but they found a way to make his expanses of black and white work for their own distinctive styles. This book, like many of those of the period, features colour plates but I much prefer Heath Robinson’s black & white work to his watercolours. His Poe book contains many fine drawings but his style is more suited to this Shakespeare play, especially in the depictions of clouds of fairy figures tumbling through the air.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

Another gem from the Archive.org collection of PDF scans from American libraries. This edition of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe from 1900 was illustrated by William Heath Robinson (1872–1944), an artist whose later cartoons of quirky inventions have completely overshadowed his earlier books and the work of his equally talented older brother, Charles. I’m probably in the minority in preferring his book illustration to his cartoons and this edition of Poe is a superb example of his mastery of line and space. It can’t compete with Harry Clarke’s Poe, of course, but then no one can compete with that. WHR wasn’t really suited to the darker side of literature but he acquits himself here far better than Arthur Rackham did when he attempted his own Poe collection in 1935.

• Bud Plant’s W Heath Robinson page
• W Heath Robinson’s fairy tale illustrations

The Conqueror Worm.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

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

Fantastic Art (1973).
Cover: Earth by Arcimboldo.

I’d thought of writing something about this book series even before I started this weblog since there’s very little information to be found about it online. I can’t compete with the serious Penguin-heads—and I’m not much of a dedicated book collector anyway—but I do have a decent collection of the art books that Pan/Ballantine published in the UK throughout the 1970s. These were published simultaneously by Ballantine/Peacock Press in the US and nearly all were edited by David Larkin, with Betty Ballantine overseeing the American editions. Two of the series, the Dalí and Magritte, were among the first art books I owned. Over the years I’ve gradually accumulated almost the full set and I always look for their distinctive white spines in secondhand shops.

The Pan books were a uniform size, approximately A4 (297 x 210 mm), with a single picture on each recto page and generous margins. The reproductions were excellent, printed on quality paper, and all featured specially-commissioned introductions (Ballard for the Dali book) with those pages printed on textured sheets. Each book was beautifully designed, with the opening pages and introductions often featuring black and white vignettes if the artists in question produced line drawings. Editor Larkin’s focus was on art that tended to the fantastic, visionary or imaginative, something that was in vogue throughout the Seventies after psychedelic art had ransacked the Victorian and Edwardian eras for inspiration a few years earlier. Aubrey Beardsley had been rediscovered in the mid-Sixties (ending up on the cover of Sgt. Pepper) and underground magazines such as Oz and IT helped create a renewed interest in art that would look good when you were stoned or tripping. The Pan books weren’t “head books” as such but its probably fair to say that the series was supported and made possible by that spirit.

Magritte (1972).
Cover: The Son of Man.

As the series developed, the format evolved away from fine art towards contemporary fantasy art, and as a result became less interesting for me, although the success of the Frazetta books undoubtedly meant that this was the way the sales were going. The demand for the Ernst and Rousseau titles can be gauged by the remainder cut-outs on their covers. The final volumes (which I’ve never bought) featured artists such as Brian Froud (The Dark Crystal), Alan Lee (The Lord of the Rings) and others, with their Faeries, Giants, Castles and Gnomes books. I’m still missing a couple of the earlier numbers which I could now order online but that would spoil the game of letting chance deliver the goods, wouldn’t it?

Fantastic Art is easily my favourite, a great collection of visionary work through the ages beginning with Bosch and proceeding through Goya, John Martin, Richard Dadd, the Symbolists and the Surrealists to what was then contemporary work by artists such as Hundertwasser. This was one of the first of the series and seems to be the key volume in the way it provides an overview of the art that would follow.

Dali (1974).
Cover: Raphaelesque Head Exploding.

A great introduction by JG Ballard in this one, replete with the usual phrases about “the dark causeways of our spinal columns”.

Innocent Art (1974).
Cover: Cat by André Duranton.

A collection of what used to be called naive painting, ie: work by unschooled “Sunday painters” such as Rousseau. Outsider art is the preferred term these days even though the work itself hasn’t always changed.

Max Ernst (1975).
Cover: Euclid.

Ernst’s later work in this book was the most abstract and experimental of the series. Europe After the Rain was printed across a fold-out sheet so that its full width could be displayed.

Rousseau (1975).
Cover: The Merry Jesters.

The English Dreamers (1975).
Cover: The Bridesmaid by John Everett Millais.

Arthur Rackham (1975).
Cover: Clerk Colville (from Some British Ballads).

Temptation (1975).
Cover: Ferdinand Lured by Ariel by John Everett Millais.

An unusual collection with a wide range of pictures (Bosch, Alma-Tadema, Balthus). Mainly concerns sexual temptation for female bodies but also includes Biblical and other temptations.

The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta (1975).
Cover: Egyptian Queen.

The book that launched a thousand metal albums. Volume One here was the first attempt to collect Frazetta’s work and was easily the most popular title of the series, going through many reprintings and inspiring three more volumes to follow. Many of the reproductions are superior to their equivalents in the later Icon retrospective collection. This was the first one I bought after the Surrealist books and, while I’ve never been a muscle fan, I couldn’t help but notice all the male flesh on display.

The Fantastic Creatures of Edward Julius Detmold (1976).
Cover: Shere Khan in the jungle (from The Jungle Book).

Charles and William Heath Robinson (1976).
Cover: Elfin Mount (from Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales).

A collection of the Robinsons’ fairy tale paintings. A break from the format with a blue cover.

The Paintings of Carl Larsson (1976).
Cover: The Kitchen.

Another break with the format as the book is printed landscape to suit Larsson’s drawings and paintings. As with the Ernst book, a fold-out page was a special feature.

The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen (1977).
Cover: The Tale of the Third Dervish.

A collection of Nielsen’s work modelled after Turkish and Persian miniatures.

Frank Frazetta, Book Two (1977).
Cover: Dark Kingdom.

Frank Frazetta, Book Three (1978).
Cover painting: Nightwinds.

The Fantastic Art of Sulamith Wülfing (1978).
Cover: The Big Dragon.

Part of the series but published by Fontana/Collins, not Pan.

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