Weekend links 788

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The Witches’ Flight (1798) by Francisco Goya.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine reviews the latest book from Tartarus, a biography of T. Lobsang Rampa by R.B. Russell. You don’t hear much about Rampa today but, as Mark says, old copies of his books have for many years been common sights on the Spiritualism/Occult shelves of British bookshops. Rampa wasn’t a Tibetan monk as he claimed in his first book, The Third Eye, but a very non-Tibetan Englishman, Cyril Henry Hoskin, whose stories about his early years evolved following press investigations into a claim of being possessed by the spirit of a Tibetan doctor named Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. Hoskin maintained the Rampa persona for the rest of his life, writing many more books about the mystic East, as well as accounts of his contact with the planet Venus and his psychic connection with his Siamese cat. The Rampa books were very popular in the 1960s—my mother had three or four of them—despite continual accusations that their author was a fraud.

• New music: The Hadronic Seeress And Other Wyrd Tales by The Wyrding Module; Master Builder by Xeeland; Resurrection Of The Foghorns by Everyday Dust.

• The twelfth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi), and in English at Alan Moore World.

• Rivers of galaxies: Mark Neyrinck on the cosmic web and other metaphors that describe the largest structures in the Universe.

• “Curation becomes subservient to metrics.” Derek Walmsley on how Spotify distorts genre histories.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Erica Ward presents Tokyo as a living, breathing organism.

• At the BFI: Chloe Walker chooses 10 great films by one-time directors.

• At Unquiet Things: How Yuko Shimizu rewires ancient stories.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Jana Thork.

• RIP Ozzy Osbourne.

Web Weaver (1974) by Hawkwind | The Web (1985) by Cabaret Voltaire | Web (1992) by Brian Eno

Bob Haberfield: The Man and His Art

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Presenting a new book design, and a very substantial production. Bob Haberfield: The Man and His Art is a two-volume slipcased collection of the late Bob Haberfield’s drawings, paintings and illustrations, dating from his youth in Australia to his retirement in Wales. As a commercial artist, Haberfield is best known for the many cover paintings he produced in the 1970s for fantasy, horror and SF books, especially those for the Michael Moorcock novels published in the UK by Mayflower. He continued to work as a cover illustrator in the 1980s but his career encompassed album cover design during the 1960s in Australia, advertising and product illustration in Australia and Britain, and a great deal of personal work, all of which is covered here. The books were commissioned by Bob’s son, Ben Haberfield, who contributes a personal reminiscence and biographical note; the books also feature a discussion of Bob’s art by an old friend, Garry Kinnane, along with shorter pieces and remembrances by Michael Moorcock, Rodney Matthews, Peter Meerman, John Guy Collick, and John Davey.

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As for the artwork, this covers an extraordinary range of styles and media. The first volume, The Man, is Haberfield’s personal catalogue of his career, covering his days at art school in the 1960s to his years in Wales. The second volume, His Art, is the commercial work: book covers, record and magazine covers, and a large amount of product illustration for advertising, supermarkets and food companies. Haberfield was a versatile artist with a flair for imitation, something which helped his later illustrations for product packaging (biscuits, chocolates, etc) where he was often him to create paintings or drawings in very different styles. So too with his book covers, many of which have gone unidentified for years because the publishers didn’t give Haberfield a credit, while the artwork wasn’t easily identifiable as being Haberfield’s own. I’m pleased that we’ve been able to confirm that several uncredited Panther paperbacks are Haberfields.

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Genre illustrators tend to fall into two camps: the first group enjoy doing the kinds of drawing or painting that they’re requested to do for cover commissions, and are happy to do more of the same when left alone. The second group approach cover work as a job and nothing more; when left to their own devices you find them painting landscapes or portraits or whatever. Bob Haberfield was definitely in the second category. He landed in London in 1968 just as Mayflower Books was scaling up its publishing with a line of books that included UK paperback debuts of Michael Moorcock novels. Haberfield’s covers immediately stood out from Mayflower’s other books of the period, most of which were unimpressive photographic productions. Moorcock’s career took off shortly after; the Mayflower books were reprinted in larger quantities, and for a several years those books and Haberfield’s Buddhist-themed paintings were unavoidable in British bookshops. The Moorcock covers only occupy a small percentage of the pages in this collection but for many people they’ll be the main point of interest. It wasn’t possible to present all of the original paintings, many of them having been lost over the years or sold to unknown private collectors. But the collection does include a complete gallery of Haberfield’s Moorcock cover art, along with covers and original paintings for Panther (mostly horror titles), Penguin and others.

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My design for the collection is fairly restrained, the main concern having been the presentation of hundreds of individual pieces of artwork; there are 608 pages altogether, containing around 800 individual paintings and drawings. The headlines are set in various weights of Busorama, a font launched in 1970 which is a common sight in design from that decade. Putting this lot together involved considerable effort, especially on the part of co-editor/publisher John Davey. It’s good to see it out at last.

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The books are published by Jayde Design and are available here. RRP is £52 which is a lot but pretty much the standard for a two-volume slipcased set. More page samples follow below. There’s also an early review by The Outlaw Bookseller at YouTube.

Continue reading “Bob Haberfield: The Man and His Art”

Four Horsemen

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Drie Apocalyptische Ruiters (c. 1943) by Willem Adolfs.

Willem Adolfs’ painting only shows three Horsemen of the Apocalypse but his picture is too good to be buried at the foot of this post. Adolfs was a Dutch artist whose work I hadn’t looked at before. His painting is a product of wartime, so the absence of the white horse (usually symbolising war) may perhaps be taken as referring to the conditions of its production. Adolfs spent the later war years in German concentration camps, dying in one near Hamburg in 1945.

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Saint John sees the Four Horsemen (no date) by Jean Duvet.

After looking at Albrecht Dürer’s apocalyptic woodcuts last week I went searching for more depictions of the Four Horsemen. The quartet are the most familiar characters of the Book of Revelation, and such a useful symbol that their appearance has over the centuries become detached from their Biblical origins. War, Pestilence, Famine and Death embody perennial, universal fears, they don’t require a Christian framing to be acknowledged.

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Apocalypse flamande (15th century).

There are many depictions of the Four Horsemen, especially from earlier centuries when war in particular tended to arrive on horseback. Recent depictions are less common. In 19th-century art Christian symbols had a cultural weight they no longer possess; paintings of Lucifer or the Whore of Babylon are staples of metal album covers but you’re unlikely to find them in art galleries.

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Death on a Pale Horse (1796) by Benjamin West.

The Bruce Pennington paintings at the end of the post are unusual in this respect, being relatively recent and seriously intended despite being the work of an artist known mainly for his book covers. The paintings are from Eschatus, an album-sized volume published by Paper Tiger/Dragon’s World in 1976. The book is a series of pictures illustrating Pennington’s own translations of the prophecies of Nostradamus, a cycle of events which he depicts as apocalyptic science fiction. It’s a strange work, and not a very comprehensible one, but it does include the inevitable Horsemen on the cover painting, along with a portrait of Death (aka Ghost Rider) which appears in a detail on the back cover.

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Vidi, quod aperuisset agnus… (1809) by Luigi Sabatelli.

Continue reading “Four Horsemen”

Weekend links 787

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Noonday Heat (1903) by Henry Scott Tuke.

• It may still be summer but the Halloween film reissues are already being announced. This year Radiance Films is presenting two features by Belgian director Harry Kümel: the lesbian vampire drama Daughters of Darkness (UHD+BD | BD), and Malpertuis, Kümel’s adaptation of the Jean Ray fantasy novel. This week I’ve been watching Polish animated films on Radiance’s just-released Essential Polish Animation.

• At Colossal: Dennis Lehtonen documents a pair of immense icebergs paying a visit to a small Greenland village.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: ShoreZone, nine short stories by dramatist David Rudkin.

The problem is that the extraterrestrials that xenolinguists claim to seek are often beings imagined to have technologies, minds or languages similar to ours. They are projections of ourselves. This anthropomorphism risks blinding us to truly alien communicators, who are radically unlike us. If there are linguistic beings on planets such as TOI-700 d or Kepler-186f, or elsewhere in our galaxy, their modes of communication may be utterly incomprehensible to us. How, then, can xenolinguistics face its deficit of imagination?

Perhaps by re-engaging its speculative origins. Through the mode of thought characteristic of science fiction, the science of alien language might yet learn to open itself to every conceivable degree of otherness, even the possibility of beings that share nothing with us but the cosmos.

Eli K P William on problems in xenolinguistics

• DJ Food’s latest foray into pop psychedelia is a look at the psych influence on the teen romance comics of the late 1960s: part 1 | part 2 | part 3.

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – July 2025 at Ambientblog, and Bleep Mix #305 by Adam Wiltzie.

• “The hot tar splashed everywhere.” Dale Berning Sawa on Derek Jarman’s Black Paintings.

• At Unquiet Things: Meet your friendly neighbourhood art book author & book seller.

Winners of the 2025 Big Picture natural world photography competition.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty chooses 10 great heatwave films.

The closest images ever taken of the Sun’s atmosphere.

Kae Tempest’s favourite records.

Heat (1983) by Soft Cell | Heatwave (1984) by The Blue Nile | Heatwave (1987) by Univers Zero

Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse

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Revelation of St. John.

In Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy, John of Patmos, the author of the Book of Revelation, is referred to as “Saint John the Mushroom-head”, the suggestion being that the bizarre and grotesque scenes listed at the end of the Bible were the result of hallucinogenic frenzy. Mushroom-derived or not, John’s apocalyptic visions have fuelled the imagination of artists for a very long time, and in a wide variety of media. The earlier chapters of the New Testament are the more popular ones when it comes to adaptations but only the Book of Revelation has inspired two monuments of progressive rock: the 666 album by Aphrodite’s Child, and Supper’s Ready by Genesis.

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Martyrdom of Saint John the Evangelist.

Die Offenbarung St. Johannis (1900) is a recent upload at the Internet Archive which presents Albrecht Dürer’s magnificent set of Apocalypse woodcuts in a single volume. Multiple copies of the same prints may be found at Wikimedia Commons but sets of pictures there are always divided into separate pages; where possible, I prefer to have a book to leaf through. I love to pore over Dürer’s prints, they’re always crowded with tiny details rendered with great precision. The fifth plate in this series, showing the arrival of the Four Horsemen, is the one you see reproduced most often, and it’s a typically cramped composition; Dürer was an artist who often seemed to want to cram as much as possible into the available space. Some of the later plates in the series have the same powerful sense of occult strangeness that you find in the best alchemical engravings, especially plate eleven which shows John being instructed by an angel with a blazing face to eat a book. The Biblical text describes the angel as appearing suspended over columns of fire, but Dürer shows the columns as a pair of architectural limbs that happen to be burning at their terminations. It’s an example of proto-Surrealist imagery that makes me wonder what a set of Albrecht Dürer Tarot cards might have looked like.

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Vision of the Seven Candlesticks.

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Saint John Before God and the Elders.

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Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Continue reading “Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse”