{books} – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 811

A still from The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), a feature-length animated film by Lotte Reiniger.

• Hélice 39 is a speculative-fiction journal (in Spanish) whose current issue includes an article by Marcelo Sanchez: “What did Borges think of Lovecraft?”

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

• Old music: Hydrophony For Dagon by Max Eastley & Michael Prime; The Adventures Of Prince Achmed by Morricone Youth.

• Public Domain Review lists some of the writers whose works will enter the public domain this year.

• “Modern Japanese Printmakers celebrates vibrant mid-20th-century innovation“.

• At Nautilus: “Here’s what’s happening in the brain when you’re improvising.”

• At the BFI: Pamela Hutchinson selects 10 great films of 1926.

• New music: The Future Is Now by Pietro Zollo.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Phil Solomon Day.

• 2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse.

• Runaway Horses (“poetry written with a splash of blood”) (1985) by Philip Glass | Unicorns Were Horses (1996) by New Kingdom | Red Horse (2002) by Jack Rose

02026

The Basket of Bread (1926) by Salvador Dalí.

Happy new year. 02026? An affectation via the Long Now.

The Cello Player (1926) by Edwin Dickinson.

Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926) by Otto Dix.

The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Eluard and the Artist (1926) by Max Ernst.

The Musician’s Table (1926) by Juan Gris.

Continue reading “02026”

Harry Clarke’s Elixirs of Life

A magazine ad.

Of all the books illustrated by Harry Clarke the most scarce are a pair of slim volumes published 100 years ago by the Jameson distillery to promote their brand of Irish whiskey. The books were never widely distributed, being given away to distillery visitors. Copies of the illustrations were still hard to find in 2011 when I wrote a brief post about them. Collections of Clarke’s work seldom pay the books much attention beyond reproducing one or two drawings but by trawling the auction houses it’s now possible to accumulate most of the illustrations. With the ongoing interest in Clarke’s work I keep expecting Jameson to publish facsimile reprints but so far this doesn’t seem to have happened. The information below is taken from Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art (1983) by Nicola Gordon Bowe. A couple more illustrations from The History of a Great House may be found in Hiroshi Unno’s exceptional study, Harry Clarke – An Imaginative Genius in Illustrations and Stained-glass Arts.

The History of a Great House — Origin of John Jameson Whiskey, containing some Interesting Observations thereon together with the Causes of Its Present Scarcity. Printed by Maunsel and Roberts Ltd, Dublin 1924 for the distillers; 24 pp, 8 x 4.75 inches, 21 black line drawings blocked in with viridian, one repeated as an endpiece, custard paper cover (8 x 5 inches), printed with additional black and viridian drawing.

Continue reading “Harry Clarke’s Elixirs of Life”

Weekend links 809

Atlantis by Sarah Hubacher.

• Regular readers will know Leigh Wright from his Wyrd Daze creations which I’ve linked here many times in the past. (The same goes for his frequent Mixcloud compilations.) Leigh’s wife died recently which means he now has to return to the UK from Canada where he doesn’t have permanent resident status. His request for help is here.

• Melinda Gebbie’s Greatest Fits: “Ranging from painting, illustration, Comix, portraiture, eroticism and so much more, this fully illustrated and beautifully presented book is a glimpse into the unique mind of a woman forged in the fire of counterculture.”

• At The Daily Heller: Adrian Wilson’s collection of elaborate vintage fabric stamps is explored in a two-part feature here and here.

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – December 2025 at Ambientblog, and ASIP – Reflection on 2025 at A Strangely Isolated Place.

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

• At Colossal: “Field Kallop meditates on universal patterns through bold chromatic compositions.”

• “Scientists discover massive underwater ruins that may be a lost city of legend.”

• New music: The King In Yellow by Blarke Bayer.

• RIP Rob Reiner.

• Atlantis (1955) by Les Baxter | The Atlantis Healing Harp (1982) by Upper Astral | A Man For Atlantis (2000) by Broadcast

Fire in the Blood: Harry Clarke

An all-too-short run through the biography of Harry Clarke, Fire in the Blood was made by Irish TV channel RTE in 2016 as part of a series devoted to the Celtic Revival. Camille O’Sullivan is the guide to Clarke’s life and work in a film which includes some commentary from Clarke expert Nicola Gordon Bowe, among others. 24 minutes isn’t enough time to cover the full range of the artist’s work but any Clarke documentary is better than none, and this one has a number of points in its favour. Clarke’s stained-glass windows are given a prominent place in the discussion, a reminder that stained-glass production was Clarke’s primary business even while his success as an illustrator increased. The stained-glass medium is an especially attractive one for a TV documentary—the colours of the windows glow on the screen in a manner they can never do on a page—and you could easily fill an hour with a discussion of Clarke’s remarkable glasswork alone. The end of the film includes some discussion about the scandal of Clarke’s last major work in the medium, the so-called Geneva Window, commissioned by the Irish government as a gift for the League of Nations then disowned when Clarke’s choice of subject (and the manner of its depiction) was deemed unsuitable. As with earlier objections to the work of Aubrey Beardsley, the complaints seem scarcely credible today but the window ended up being sold to an American collector.

On the illustration side we get to see pages from a little-known work of Clarke’s, the frame designs for the pages in Ireland’s Memorial Records, a multi-volume record of the names of Irish soldiers who died in the First World War. Nicola Gordon Bowe’s Clarke studies show the title page but seeing all the frames in print wasn’t possible until the publication of Harry Clarke’s War by Marguerite Helmers. The silhouettes of the soldiers embedded in each frame form a sequential narrative describing the progress of the war amid knotted borders that hark back to the page designs of the Book of Kells.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Harry Clarke’s illustrated Swinburne
• More Harry Clarke online
• Harry Clarke online
• Harry Clarke record covers
• Thomas Bodkin on Harry Clarke
• Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art
• Harry Clarke and others in The Studio
• Harry Clarke’s Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
• Harry Clarke in colour
• The Tinderbox
• Harry Clarke and the Elixir of Life
• Cardwell Higgins versus Harry Clarke
• Modern book illustrators, 1914
• Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke
• Strangest Genius: The Stained Glass of Harry Clarke
• Harry Clarke’s stained glass
• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931