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Another view over Yuggoth

The original Yuggoth collage, 1994.

Three years ago I resurrected my panorama of R’lyeh from The Call of Cthulhu, a process that took five months from start to finish as I redrew a large and very detailed picture. Last month I spent a much shorter time doing the same for one of the other pieces of art that went missing after being printed in 1994, the Haeckel collage that I titled Yuggoth. I don’t think I’ve mentioned before that this was originally created as a potential cover for the first edition of the Starry Wisdom collection published by Creation Books. My Cthulhu strip had already been accepted for the book when I was asked to create something for the cover. The painting I eventually submitted was rather mediocre, not terrible but I’d only been painting with acrylics for a year or so and was still getting used to the medium. By the time Creation rejected the cover the print deadline was approaching so I had little time to create anything new. Having recently bought a copy of the Dover edition of Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature I decided to try and make a suitably Lovecraftian collage using Haeckel’s prints.

The original collage as it appeared on the cover of HP Lovecraft: Tales of Horror in 2022. Cover design by Jo Obaroswki.

Yuggoth was the result, created in a day or so after I’d rushed to the local copy shop and returned with a large quantity of paper which I chopped up then tried to assemble into a coherent form. I duly posted the result to Creation unaware that they’d already decided to use some of Peter Smith’s Lovecraft art on the cover. I was okay with this, I liked Smith’s drawings and Yuggoth ended up appearing inside the book. Despite the hasty production process I’d taken the precaution of photocopying the collage before it went into the post, something I did with the rest of the artwork, so even though the original Yuggoth was lost (or stolen or whatever actually happened to all that artwork) I’ve still had something which was usable years later. It was this photocopied version that appeared a few years later in my Haunter of the Dark book, as well as on the cover of the Fall River Lovecraft collection, Tales of Horror, in 2022.

The reworked Yuggoth collage, 2024.

The photocopied version was usable, then, but not ideal. The original collage had been made with photocopies produced by a machine which didn’t deal very well with the halftones in Haeckel’s plates. This gave the final piece a rough, posterised quality, the roughness being intensified once the whole thing was copied again. The resurrected version has been pieced together from scans of the original Haeckel book with everything in the same size and (almost) the same placement as before, only now all of the halftones and other fine detail are intact. And while I was going to all this trouble I decided to change the architectural details in the original to something more in keeping with the rest of the picture. The planet Yuggoth (or Pluto as human beings know it) is more alluded to than actually described in Lovecraft’s fiction, but we do know that the place is inhabited by a race of fungoid aliens. I’ve always thought of Yuggoth as being architecturally rich as well as inhabited, rather like the alien worlds that Frank R. Paul used to paint for the back covers of Fantastic Adventures magazine, but in my haste to create the collage I’d resorted to copying Cambodian and Thai temples from a book of architectural engravings. These have now been replaced by structures that are more in keeping with the other elements. Using Haeckel for architectural inspiration has a minor history, as I’ve noted before. The French architect and designer René Binet had been looking at Haeckel’s plates in 1900 when he designed the arched gateway for the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Binet later expanded on this design with Esquisses Décoratives, a book of proposals for more Haeckel-derived architecture produced in collaboration with Gustave Geffroy.

The tinted version you see here is now available as prints and other products at Redbubble. My shop there is still a little understocked but I intend to keep adding to it in the coming months. As before, I’ll mainly be doing prints at Redbubble, all my T-shirt sales are now being handled by Skull Print. The latter emailed their final dates for pre-Xmas orders today: 6th December for overseas and 18th December for the UK. Skull Print will also be taking a break at the beginning of January so they won’t be dealing with any new orders until the 15th of that month. Thanks.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ghost Box and The Infinity Box

Weekend links 753

Grow (1970) by Linda Brewer.Via.

• The week in work-related reviews: Raymond Tyler reviewed the Bumper Book of Magic at Religious Socialism, while James Palmer did the same at Foreign Policy. Meanwhile, Rob Latham at the Los Angeles Review of Books examined the legacy of the New Wave of science fiction with reviews of New Worlds 224, and The Last Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison’s long-delayed story collection.

• “Incline Press is a private fine press publisher in the UK, stubbornly printing with hand set, metal type on a collection of vintage machines, working with poets and artists to make limited edition books and ephemera.”

• New music: Horses In Your Blood, another dose of unhinged weirdness from Moon Wiring Club; The Source by Jon Palmer; and Ekkorääg by Tarotplane.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Rikki Ducornet The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade (1999).

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “Rare atlas of astronomy from the Dutch Golden Age goes on display in England“.

• Old music: Jon Savage’s Space, a space-themed compilation on Caroline True Records.

• At The Daily Heller: Berman’s Book Boom is a boon to graphic design’s legacy.

• At Public Domain Review: Christoph Jamnitzer’s Neuw Grotteßken Buch (1610).

• Mix of the week: A Dungeon Synth mix by Flickers From The Fen for The Wire.

• At Heavy Metal Magazine: The HP Lovecraft Art of John Holmes.

• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Laurie Anderson.

• I Can Hear The Grass Grow (1967) by The Move | Grow Fins (1972) by Captain Beefheart | The Growing (2011) by The Haxan Cloak

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” Zdzisław Beksiński. I like Beksiński’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 Beksiński’s paintings.

As with the Mnémos covers for Frank Belknap Long and Clark Ashton Smith, you could use many different Beksiński 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). Beksiński’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 }
• Beksiński on film
• Beksiński 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.

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