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Intégrale Howard Phillips Lovecraft

More Lovecraft book covers. Blame the season for this although depictions of Lovecraft’s cosmos have been occupying my thoughts for a while now, as I explain below.

A couple of years ago I wrote about the weird-fiction collections that Mnémos had been publishing in France, all of which used for their cover art paintings by the Polish “anti-symbolist” Zdzislaw Beksinski. I like Beksinski’s paintings very much, and thought they were a good match for most of the covers that Mnémos had produced, being sufficiently weird and evocative without being directly illustrative. (The sole exception was the peculiar dog-like creature on the cover of a Frank Belknap Long collection, The Hounds of Tindalos. Long’s “hounds” are malevolent extra-dimensional entities whose name shouldn’t be taken literally.) I mentioned that Mnémos had also announced a seven-volume collection of HP Lovecraft’s fiction and non-fiction, but at the time of writing there were no pictures of the books available, and I’d forgotten all about the collection until a few days ago. All the books in the set, which are translated by David Camus, have since been reprinted as standalone volumes.

Intégrale Howard Phillips Lovecraft is a little deceptive as a title for a Lovecraft collection when the word “intégrale” is often applied to complete editions of something. The Mnémos set looks like it contains all of the fiction in the first few volumes plus a quantity of essays, but Lovecraft famously wrote more letters than he did stories; the letters here are a small selection inside volume 6. In addition to the books, the collection also contains a map of the Dreamlands, together with cards and bookmarks embellished with details from Beksinski’s paintings.

As with the Mnémos covers for Frank Belknap Long and Clark Ashton Smith, you could use many different Beksinski paintings for these editions, all of which would work to some degree. Even if some of them seem mismatched they offer a change of direction away from those varieties of fantasy art which have become very mannered in recent years when applied to weird fiction in general and Lovecraft’s stories in particular. This is partly a result of over-production: the huge success of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game drove a demand for more and more Lovecraftian artwork, with the result that clichés emerged sooner than they would have done if the available imagery was limited to book illustrations and comic strips. I’ve contributed to the situation as much as most although I’ve also kept trying to find directions away from the stereotypes; my Cthulhoid picture was one such attempt even it still leans on the tentacular. I’ve been thinking recently of following the King in Yellow portrait with more poster-size art that explores other possibilities in this area. I’d encourage other artists to do the same when they can (commercial constraints often force your hand). Beksinski’s paintings show one route out of the mannerist cul-de-sac.

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

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Beksinski on film
• Beksinski at Mnémos

Richard Taylor’s Lovecraftiana

The Mask of Cthulhu (1958) by August Derleth.

To look at any of the cartoons drawn for the New Yorker by Richard Taylor (1902–1970) you wouldn’t suspect that the Canadian artist had spent a few years at the end of the 1950s creating a handful of book covers for Arkham House. I’ve never read much about the history of August Derleth’s publishing endeavours so I can’t say how Taylor came to be offered this work. An unlikely choice he may have been but he did a better job with his five covers than many of the artists in the 60s and 70 who attempted to illustrate the eldritch horrors of Lovecraft, Derleth and co. The hand-drawn titles and monochrome colours make the quintet an attractive series within the Arkham House catalogue as a whole.

The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (1959) edited by August Derleth.

A collection of Lovecraft’s fiction fragments, some of which have been expanded by Derleth. Also remembrances of the writer by Lovecraft’s friends, plus essays and other material.

Dreams and Fancies (1962) by HP Lovecraft.

A cover I’ve known for years as a result of its being featured in that cult volume of mine, The Fantasy Book by Franz Rottensteiner. (Previously.) I used to wonder about the contents of this book, Dreams and Fancies being an unfamiliar title that was absent from the paperback reprints of Lovecraft’s fiction. The title piece is another Derleth fabulation, a collage of Lovecraft’s transcribed dreams as they were recounted in letters to various friends. This is followed by some of the short fiction and poetry that reworked these dreams. The collection ends with the aeon-spanning novella, The Shadow Out of Time, which Tayor has taken as his subject for the cover art.

The Trail of Cthulhu (1962) by August Derleth.

The Horror from the Hills (1963) by Frank Belknap Long.

Note: I’m a little sceptical that the Richard Taylor responsible for these covers is the same one who was drawing cartoons for the New Yorker. The only source for this is isfdb.org, a site whose artist attributions are sometimes erroneous. If anyone can confirm or deny the accuracy of this information then please leave a comment.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The Lovecraft archive

Eldritch Art Nouveau: Lovecraft at Ballantine

Ballantine Books published a number of Lovecraft and Lovecraft-related titles in paperback in 1976, all with uniform cover designs featuring a bold Art Nouveau-style border. I’ve seen these covers on many occasions but hadn’t paid the artwork much attention until I was browsing Fontinuse last week and realised that artist Murray Tinkelman had borrowed his dragons and scowling fish from a book by Anton Seder, Das Thier in der Decorativen Kunst, a collection of animal designs for artists and craftspeople. (See below.) Writing about Seder’s book a couple of years ago I referred to “piscine grotesques that I’ll be looking at if I ever have to draw the inhabitants of Innsmouth again”, unaware that another artist had already plundered the book for just this reason.

Murray Tinkelman (1933–2016) was a versatile illustrator but he was better suited to science fiction and other genres, horror doesn’t seem to have been his forte. This kind of Art Nouveau styling doesn’t really suit Lovecraft either, the design being more a result of Ballantine following prevailing trends than anything else. You could make something like this work for Lovecraft if you were determined, with a border design and font choice more suited to the subject. The writhing convolvulus-like shapes favoured by Victor Horta come to mind, while one or more of the typefaces of the occult revival might be useful for the title designs.

Seder’s book of animal illustrations may be browsed at the Internet Archive although at the time of writing the site is offline for maintenance following a series of hacking incidents and DOS attacks. Here’s hoping it returns soon.

Continue reading “Eldritch Art Nouveau: Lovecraft at Ballantine”

In the Mad Mountains

Cover design by Elizabeth Story. Cover art by Mike Mignola.

The subtitle tells you everything you need to know about this new collection of Joe R. Lansdale stories from Tachyon. I designed the interior of the book, less floridly than some of my previous designs for Tachyon, and a little more abstractly than I’d usually do for a title such as this. All of the stories have been published before, and since I’d illustrated one of them (for Lovecraft’s Monsters) I had vague hopes of incorporating my earlier illustration while providing new ones for the rest of the stories. This proved impossible, however; I was working on the layout while still finishing the design for The Bumper Book of Magic so didn’t have the time to do seven more drawings. I’ll post the illustration here anyway.

The Bleeding Shadow is a great story, a low-rent detective tale set in the 1920s in which the predicament from The Music of Erich Zann—violinist has to keep playing his instrument in order to keep something terrible at bay—is recast with shellac 78s and a blues guitarist. Among the other pieces there’s a story that manages to successfully contrive a meeting between Huckleberry Finn, Brer Rabbit and the Cthulhu Mythos; and the final story which gives the collection its name, wherein the setting of Lovecraft’s Antarctic epic becomes a Sargasso-like landscape of shipwrecks, lost planes and horrors great and small. I especially enjoyed The Crawling Sky, a story of the Old Weird West featuring a Solomon Kane-like itinerant preacher, the Reverend Jebidiah Mercer. Lansdale’s grotesque humour is to the fore in this one. I’d like to see the Reverend given a collection of his own someday.