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Novelty and curio catalogues

One of the more esoteric corners of the Internet Archive is the section devoted to the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals: “The IAPSOP is a US-based private organization focused on the digital preservation of Spiritualist and occult periodicals published between the Congress of Vienna and the start of the Second World War.” The collection currently comprises over 30,000 items. I didn’t go looking for this while I was reading Nightmare Alley but the IAPSOP archive happens to contain the kinds of publications whose paranormal and religious jargon Stanton Carlisle uses to relieve chumps of their cash. A sub-section of the collection contains novelty and curio catalogues, publications from mail-order companies selling all manner of incense, lucky charms, cheap jewellery and minor items of occult significance. I wish I’d found these catalogues when I was working on the Bumper Book of Magic. The drawings are crude but with things like this it’s the general appearance that you’re after, the finesse you can supply yourself.

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Nightmare Alleys

Undated paperback.

My reading this week has been William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, a novel I’d been intending to read for some time after becoming familiar with the story from the first film adaptation. (I haven’t seen the recent version.) Whenever I’m reading a novel that’s been around for a while I have to see how it was presented in the past by designers and illustrators. Nightmare Alley was published in hardback originally, and the book today is marketed as a literary classic, but Gresham’s account of cheap carnivals and fraudulent mediums is sufficiently lurid enough to warrant a variety of different treaments, including pulp excess. The paperback at the top of this post is an extreme example but the cover could easily be applied to any number of noirish thrillers, there’s nothing in the artwork to suggest the carny world or the Spiritualism that the novel’s protagonist, Stanton Carlisle, mercilessly exploits.

First edition, USA, 1946.

The first edition isn’t a great design but it happens to be faithful to the core storyline, more so than many of the covers that follow. In the film we’re left to guess what the “nightmare alley” of the title might be but in the novel this is a symbol that recurs throughout the story, a literal nightmare of Carlisle’s in which he dreams he’s being chased down a dark alleyway towards a light that remains continually out of reach. The dream weighs enough on Carlisle’s mind for him to regard it as a symbol of the human condition, or at least his soured perception of the same. The cover of the first edition combines this image with the Tarot trump of The Hanged Man which Carlisle turns up in a reading as a signifier of his destiny. Tarot scholars may quibble with this detail—The Hanged Man isn’t as doom-laden or negative as the novel suggests—but Gresham makes good use of Tarot as a structural element, with each chapter named after one of the trump cards, and with elements of the story reflecting the Tarot imagery. Given all this you’d expect cover artists to use Tarot symbolism much more than they do.

First paperback edition, USA, 1948.

Another odd omission is the colour of Carlisle’s hair which the novel repeatedly tells us is blond. When Carlisle begins his career as a phony preacher and medium his blue-eyed “golden boy” persona is one of his tools for charming and deceiving wealthy widows. Gresham reinforces this in the chapter named after The Sun trump card by having Carlisle identified with the god Apollo. The film adaptations and almost all of the book covers ignore this detail.

Film tie-in, USA, 1948.

The 1947 film adaptation was directed by Edmund Golding from a screenplay by Jules Furthman. The storyline is condensed and inevitably sanitised for the screen but it’s still one of the best film noir entries from the prime noir decade.

Art by James Avati, USA, 1949.

James Avati was one of the great paperback illustrators yet even he gives Carlisle dark hair. I suspect by this point everyone expected as much after Tyrone Power’s memorable performance.

USA, 1986.

And Power’s saturnine features are still providing the dominant image forty years later.

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Weekend links 761

• At Bandcamp: Marc Masters on The Curious Case of the Channeled New Age Tape; and Erick Bradshaw’s guide to Nurse With Wound.

• At Public Domain Review: Designing the Sublime – Boullée and Ledoux’s Architectural Revolution by Hugh Aldersey-Williams.

• The fifth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

It does not follow that the scientific spirit of empirical inquiry runs against dreaming, and [André] Breton was wrong to think [Roger] Caillois’s investigative methods opposed wonder. Material mysticism led Caillois back to magical thinking, which he expanded further than the Surrealist interest in chance and coincidence as he probed for insights into the order of things. Caillois was equally, perhaps even more, fascinated with magic than the Surrealists, but he wanted to probe what might exist as phenomenally marvelous, beyond the subjective self—he was a scholar of the sacred, and from the episode of the jumping beans onwards, he looked for its character and its workings in actual phenomena. In this sense he was more of a believer—though not in a personal god or a religion. Where Breton exalted the perceiver, Caillois wanted to go beyond these anthropocentric limits.

Marina Warner on the imaginary logic of Roger Caillois

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – January 2025 at Ambientblog, and Unrush 093 at A Strangely Isolated Place.

• At Criterion.com: Reincarnations of a Rebel Muse – David Hudson on Delphine Seyrig.

• Old music renewed: Angherr Shisspa (Revisited) by Koenjihyakkei.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Laura Dern’s Day.

• Jussi Lehtisalo’s favourite music.

• Lynch music: The Beast (1956) by Milt Buckner | Honky Tonk (Part 1) (1958) by Bill Doggett | Something Wicked This Way Comes (1996) by Barry Adamson

David Lynch, 1946–2025

Photo by Frank Connor from The Elephant Man: The Book of the Film (1980).

I feel at a loss for words on this occasion, Lynch’s films have been a continual presence in my life since I saw The Elephant Man in 1981. I’d actually been thinking of watching some of them again, maybe even having a full-on Lynch season the way I did in 2018 when I watched everything in sequence, from his early shorts through to Twin Peaks: The Return which at the time had just been released on disc.

A few random thoughts:

• My first sighting of Eraserhead was on the big video screens at the Hacienda in Manchester in late 1982. Claude Bessy used to play clips from his video collection, all of them silent because a DJ was usually playing music at the same time, so you’d end up seeing confusing, contextless shots from films like A Clockwork Orange, Shogun Assassin, various Andy Warhol films, and so on. I got to see Eraserhead in full shortly after this at a proper cinema on a double-bill with George Romero’s The Crazies. The Romero was fun but the Lynch was a doorway to another world.

Photo from Lynch on Lynch (1997).

• Anyone writing about Lynch’s early features, especially Eraserhead, ought to mention sound designer Alan Splet. Lynch himself was always full of praise for Splet; the pair worked on the soundtracks together but Splet had a unique way of processing sounds which is all over the early films from The Grandmother on. You can gauge Splet’s sonic invention by watching The Black Stallion, a Lynch-less film for which Splet won an Oscar, where the sounds of panting horses are stranger than anything in any other film about horses or horse-racing. If you were familiar with Splet’s weirdness then his absence from Wild at Heart was a significant loss; Randy Thom is a good sound designer but he’s not in the same league. As Paul Schütze noted in his Splet obituary for The Wire in 1995, the soundtrack of Eraserhead is one of the foundations of the whole “dark ambient” genre of music.

• Some favourite Splet moments in Lynch’s films: the industrial sounds that accompany Treves’ walk through the East End in The Elephant Man; the visit from the Guild Navigator at the beginning of Dune; Jeffrey’s dream in Blue Velvet.

• For all the times I’ve watched Blue Velvet I still don’t know what that thing is hanging on Jeffrey’s bedroom wall.

• Lynch films are dog films.

• It was difficult not to feel like a Lynch hipster in 1990 when the world at large was forced to confront Lynch’s imagination via Twin Peaks and (to a lesser extent) Wild at Heart. We had to endure a year of people who’d spent the past decade ignoring Lynch’s films offering their opinions, along with inane comments such as “But does he have anything to say?” It was a relief when Fire Walk With Me came out and drove away the lightweights. I remember Kim Newman pointing out in his Sight and Sound review that the Twin Peaks prequel was more of a genuine horror film than many films explicitly labelled as such. The same could be said of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.

• I was pleased that Lynch was invited to contribute to the Manchester International Festival in 2019; I got to see some of his paintings and also buy Twin Peaks badges and Lynch postcards. Best of all, however, was the two weeks or so when his face was peering out of posters at tram stops and (as he is here) gazing down on pedestrians in my local high street. I’ve mentally tagged that pole as The David Lynch Lamp Post ever since.

Okay, maybe not so lost for words after all…

• Elsewhere:
(offline) Lynch on Lynch (1997), edited by Chris Rodley. 270 pages of interviews which aren’t always very revealing but which still contain a wealth of detail and anecdote about the making of the films. Also a fair amount of discussion about his paintings and other artworks.
(online) 46 issues of Wrapped in Plastic, the Lynch fan magazine.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lynch dogs
• 42 One Dream Rush
• Through the darkness of future pasts
• David Lynch window displays
• David Lynch in Paris
• Inland Empire

Robert Anning Bell’s Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley

This poetry collection was drawn to my attention a couple of weeks ago when Mr TjZ sent an email containing photos of a copy he’d recently discovered. Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley was published by George Bell and Sons in 1902. The samples shown here are from a 1907 reprint, a “cheaper reissue” according to the print details which may explain why there’s so much print-through on the obverse side of the illustrated pages. I like Shelley’s poetry, and I like Robert Anning Bell’s illustrations; the pair work well together in this volume which looking back I see posted a link to years ago when writing about Bell’s illustrated edition of The Tempest.

The Shelley book may be a cheap reissue but several of the major poems still use red ink to highlight titles or illustrative details. The collection contains a number of Shelley’s longer works, opening with Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, a poem that always makes me think of Aleister Crowley. John Symonds in The Great Beast relates that Shelley was one of Crowley’s favourite poets, and that Crowley often identified himself in a pompously romantic fashion with Alastor, even though for most of his life the Beast was seldom without an attendant “Scarlet Woman” or a company of acolytes. Symonds nevertheless refers to Crowley as “Alastor” throughout his biography.

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