The art of Justin Todd

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I was pleased to find a copy of this book recently, a slim volume published in 1978 which isn’t especially rare but which usually sells for much more than the £2 I paid for it. Justin Todd is a British illustrator whose work was a familiar sight on book covers in the 1970s, especially when his commissions weren’t restricted to a single genre. Cover artists who work on fantasy novels are often asked to do horror covers (and vice versa), or edged towards science fiction when the material suits their style; Todd worked on fantasy, horror and the occasional SF title while also providing covers for mainstream novels, offbeat non-fiction, historical fiction and children’s stories. Fully-illustrated children’s books evidently became his main line of work in the 1980s—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, a collaboration with Angela Carter—which would have left him no time for cover commissions. I was amused to find him illustrating crank titles (previously) in the early 70s when he did the paperback cover for one of the great anti-crank books, John Sladek’s The New Apocrypha, a few years later.

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The Centre of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space (1972) by John C. Lilly.

Todd’s style is easy to recognise once you’ve seen a few examples: meticulous gouache renderings that tend to be slightly naive even when they’re depicting a wholly realistic story like Treasure Island. Gouache is a water-based paint that’s useful when you want a flat, even finish, but it doesn’t give you the depth of colour or contrast provided by oils or acrylics. Todd’s paintings embrace the limitations of the medium, with gradients and shadings that are so soft and diffused they might be taken at first for pencil drawings.

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The Journey to the East (1972) by Herman Hesse.

The Magical Paintings of Justin Todd isn’t a comprehensive study of Todd’s illustration work, more a snapshot of a career in progress. In addition to 64 full-page reproductions there’s a two-page interview by editor and art director Mike Dempsey which provides valuable biographical details. I was pleased to find that many of the cover paintings were ones I hadn’t seen before, including a few Arcimboldo-like faces. Todd had a flair for this kind of visual invention, constructing faces or even whole figures out of disparate objects. I’ve had a copy of The Journey to the East for many years but until this week I don’t think I’d ever looked closely at all the tiny figures making up the central figure that strides across the landscape.

Mike Dempsey maintains a blog which includes a reminiscence of working with Justin Todd.

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Stories of Five Decades (1972) by Herman Hesse.

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Secret Places of the Lion (1973) by George Hunt Williamson.

Continue reading “The art of Justin Todd”

Weekend links 783

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An illustration by William Heath Robinson for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1914).

• New music: How To Shoulder The Radiance Of Revelations by Dadub; Leviathan by Stephen Roddy; and Echoes Of The Hollow Earth by Cryo Chamber.

• At Sight & Sound: “Every time I look at the film, it gets better.” Stephen Soderbergh on Jaws.

• At Public Domain Review: The Language of Form: Lothar Schreyer’s Kreuzigung (1920).

Leafing through the merveilleux-scientifique novels today allows for a dual rediscovery: firstly, it uncovers the previously unrecognised richness of Belle Époque scientific fiction, which did not perish with the works of Verne. The stories take in journeys to Mars, solar cataclysms, reading of auras, psychic control, weighing of souls, death rays, alien invasions, even strolls among the infinitesimally small. But exploring the genre also offers insights into the cultural history of the era, marked by a significant permeability between science and pseudo-science. Reading this work, we can learn a lot about the aspirations, fears and beliefs of early 20th-century Europe.

Fleur Hopkins-Loféron on the evolution of French science fiction after Jules Verne

• Mix of the week: A Twin Peaks mix for The Wire by Lori Eschler & Dean Hurley.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Kefir.

Patrick Wolf’s favourite albums.

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Frou-Frou Foxes In Midsummer Fires (1990) by Cocteau Twins | Midsummer Night (2010) by The Time And Space Machine | Midsummer Boulevard (2022) by Hawksmoor

Armand Rassenfosse’s Fleurs du Mal

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It’s been a while since I found another illustrated edition of Baudelaire’s poems but there are still more of them out there. This surprises me a little considering the nature of Baudelaire’s writing, you can’t imagine Anglophone fin-de-siècle publishers lavishing such attention on poems which are morbid and erotic to this degree. Beresford Egan illustrated an edition of Les Fleurs du Mal but this was published in 1929 by which time Continental decadence was regarded in a more favourable light.

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Armand Rassenfosse (1862–1934) was a Belgian artist whose 1899 edition of Baudelaire is what the French would call the artist’s chef d’oeuvre, a limited reprint of Les Fleurs du Mal illustrated with colour etchings on nearly every page. Rassenfosse’s approach is much more Symbolist in tone than the near pornography of Manuel Orazi, presenting a succession of idealised figures (naked women for the most part) in nebulous spaces. I was hoping he might have produced more in this style but his other work tends to be poster design and painted studies of female dancers in various states of undress.

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Continue reading “Armand Rassenfosse’s Fleurs du Mal”

Weekend links 782

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Ushiwakamaru and Benkei (2015) by Paul Binnie.

• “Gohatto depicts homosexuality within a very specific subset of society. Kubi explores further than that, depicting homosexuality between equals, and between bosses and subordinates. It tries to depict the relationship between power and authority, and how sexuality is used to maintain that authority.” Takeshi Kitano talking about Kubi, his film about sex among the samurai, which is receiving a belated release in the UK.

• “De Rome later said he’d never felt persecuted for his sexuality, and it’s this sense of the carefree that’s reflected in the lightness of his filmmaking.” Luke Turner on Peter De Rome’s homoerotic films which are currently being screened at the Barbican, London.

• At Public Domain Review: Helen Haiman Joseph’s A Book of Marionettes (1920), “The first comprehensive history of marionette artistry in the English language.”

• Mixes of the week: Isolatedmix 132: Psilocybin Therapy Protocol v1.22a by Matt Xavier, and DreamScenes – June 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At Sight and Sound: Backwards through the backwoods: music editors Dean Hurley and Lori Eschler on David Lynch and  Twin Peaks.

Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2025 so far. Thanks again for the link here!

• New music: Interior of an Edifice Under the Sea by Pan American & Kramer, and Modulations IV by Ian Boddy.

• At The Quietus: Peer Review: Peter Strickland interviews Cosey Fanni Tutti…and vice versa.

Cosmic Dawn: A feature-length NASA documentary about the James Webb Space Telescope.

• RIP Sly Stone and Brian Wilson.

Les Marionnettes (1991) by Zbigniew Preisner | Sword Of The Samurai (2006) by Lisa Gerrard | Seven Samurai (Ending Theme) (2012) by Ryuichi Sakamoto

Weekend links 781

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Orphée aux Enfers (1896) by Jean Delville

• “Yes, there was a riot, but it was great”: Cabaret Voltaire on violent gigs, nuclear noise – and returning to mark 50 years.

• At Public Domain Review: Matthew Mullane on George Wightwick’s The Palace of Architecture (1840).

• New music: Dissever by Emptyset; Quiet Pieces by Abul Mogard; Analogues by Lawson & Merrill.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Artist Yukiko Suto finds beauty in Japanese residential neighbourhoods.

• At The Quietus: A Condition of the Space: Mary Anne Hobbs interviewed.

• At Baja el Signo de Libra: The homoerotic photography of Yves Paradis.

• Mix of the week: Bleep Mix #303 by Abul Mogard.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Stan Brakhage Day.

• RIP Edmund White.

Brakhage (1997) by Stereolab | Brakhage (2002) by Robert Poss | Barbican Brakhage (2009) by John Foxx