Readers of Alfred Kubin’s nightmarish fantasy novel, The Other Side, may like to know that a first edition was among the new uploads at the Internet Archive in December. The original printing is of note for the fine quality of its illustrations which—unlike subsequent editions—would have been taken from Kubin’s original drawings. Many of these are little more than vignettes but the book contains a number of full-page pieces that are densely cross-hatched, a technique that degrades the more the picture is copied, and which suffers even more if the picture is reduced in size, as these drawings have been in many paperback printings. I complained in an earlier post about the poor quality of the reproductions in my Dedalus reprint, and linked to a Flickr collection of scans from another first edition, but that set didn’t contain all 52 drawings. The pages of this new copy are rather discoloured but the sombre shade suits the increasingly dark tone of Kubin’s story. I imagine the author might approve.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Other Sides
• Die Andere Seite by Alfred Kubin