December 2006 – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

In print

Battling through the Xmas post, two new volumes arrived here this week, from Black Velvet and Black Dog Publishing respectively. First up was Serpenti & Scale, the Italian edition of Snakes & Ladders by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. This has been available for some time in English, of course. The translated version features some of my artwork for the Moon and Serpent CDs by Alan and Tim Perkins in the lengthy interview section that precedes Eddie’s comic strip. Thanks to Smoky Man for that.

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

Insect Lab

Euchrona Gigantea.

Mike Libby hybridizes insects and clockwork parts to create sculptures that look something like the vampiric mechanism from Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos. Via Boing Boing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Jessica Joslin
• The Museum of Fantastic Specimens

Atelier 2.3

It’s just over a year since I refashioned the main site with a better, all-CSS layout. I’ve made some cosmetic changes to this design over the past week that are now complete and uploaded, the new look being a variation on the old, presented in the style of pages from a layout application. I’m sure I’ve seen this done this somewhere before but I forget where so don’t go thinking it’s wildly original. Still needs testing properly across a range of browsers but I’ve not played with the underlying structure very much so everything should work as it did previously.

Passages 2

Some arcades via Wikipedia.

The Passage, Nevsky Avenue, Saint Petersburg.

The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan.

Leadenhall Market, London.

Gum department store, Moscow.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Passages

The Door in the Wall

Photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) illustrates HG Wells’ wonderful short stories in a rare edition of The Door in the Wall and Other Stories, from 1911. More pictures here.

The Door in the Wall was a true three-way collaboration between the author, the photographer and the typographer, Frederic W. Goudy, who specifically produced his Kennerley Old Style typeface for this book. Designed in the elegant Arts-and-Crafts style, it was printed on French hand-made paper at Goudy’s Village Press in an edition of 600 copies. In fact, only 300 copies contain the full compliment of Coburn’s rich photogravures, due to some being damaged in shipment and being replaced by aquatones. The photographer personally prepared the gravure plates, pulled proofs and oversaw the printing of the edition.

The Door in the Wall.

The Lord of the Dynamos.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• War of the Worlds book covers