{books} – Page 306 – { feuilleton }

Wildeana 9

Dorian Gray (1968) by Jim Dine; one of a series of prints for an illustrated edition. Rainbows didn’t become a gay symbol until Gilbert Baker’s flag design ten years later.

Continuing an occasional series.

• “…the Public is a very curious thing; it is sometimes perverse, and even obstinate, and it has evidently made up its mind to like the plays of Mr. Oscar Wilde.” Callum at Front Free Endpaper found a sceptical review of The Importance of Being Earnest in The Sketch for 20th February, 1895.

• “Wilde’s vision of Socialism, which at that date was probably shared by many people less articulate than himself, is Utopian and anarchistic.” George Orwell, writing in 1948, looks back at Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism.

• Oscar Wilde between Paris and Brighton: Research at the excellent Charles Ricketts & Charles Shannon blog following Wilde’s travels in the early months of 1891.

• Wilde Ride by Anthony Paletta: “Oscar Wilde spent a year in the US and met the likes of Walt Whitman and Henry James.”

• There’s plenty of Wildeana at Pinterest.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive

The labyrinth of Versailles

I ought to have mentioned this last week since a plan of the lost labyrinth of Versailles appears in the William Henry Matthews book. The labyrinth was completed for Louis XIV in 1677, and is unusual for being a series of paths without a central focus, and also a very ornamental affair containing thirty-nine fountains with accompanying statuary which depicted the animals from Aesop’s fables. The latter were a suggestion of Charles Perrault from whose Labyrinte de Versailles (1677) these illustrations are taken. The etchings are by Sébastian Le Clerc whose map shows the route that visitors would have taken in order to visit each fountain in turn. The book may be browsed here or downloaded here.

The labyrinth was removed in 1778 but Wikipedia has a page with more information including some colour prints of the fountains, and also an English list of the fables depicted.

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Weekend links 144

Ruins 3 by Rachel Thomas and Dan Tobin Smith.

“Dan wanted to do something on a really large scale and was looking at a lot of Piranesi and started talking to me about ruins. I then started looking at modern interpretations of this idea, I was obsessed with the post modern architecture of SITE, Disney fantasy settings, Busby Berkeley, Sotsass ceramics, Art Deco motifs in general, Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings, Arabic temples and on and on…” Rachel Thomas talks to Daisy Woodward about Imaginary View, an exhibition currently showing at Somerset House, London.

• A brief description of The Yokel’s Preceptor (1855), a guide to Victorian London’s gay underworld by William Dugdale. When do we get to see a facsimile of this document? The slang is a treat.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 054, a great selection by Biosphere of doomy ambience from the Post Punk/early Industrial era, 1979–1981.

Stella (Ernest Boulton) with Fanny (Frederick Park) (c. 1860–1870).

While Stella and Fanny might be the most terrible show-offs, not to mention industrious sex workers, even they drew the line at coupling in public places. Over the course of the subsequent trial, and despite bribing witnesses, the prosecution failed to prove that sodomy had ever occurred, either between the two young men themselves, or within their circle of genteel “sisters”, or even in a dark corner behind the Haymarket with a passing guardsman. Eventually, and only after a second trial a year later, the young men were found not guilty and allowed to slip back into their lives of pro-am theatricals, touring together and separately in such limp pieces as A Comical Countess and A Morning Call.

Kathryn Hughes reviews Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England by Neil McKenna. Related: photographs of the pair.

• The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale, a book of essays and a cassette tape dedicated to the television dramatist.

• Sheltered and Safe from Sorrow: “Victorian mourning rituals, tombstones, epitaphs, and other creepy things”.

• Crate digging and the resurgence of vinyl. Related: Men & Vinyl, a Tumblr devoted to men and their discs.

• Designer Shirley Tucker talks about her cover for the first edition of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

• More Will Bradley at The Golden Age (formerly Golden Age Comic Book Stories).

• The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2), a new track by The Haxan Cloak.

• Psychedelic Press UK | Related: Catnip: Egress to Oblivion?

• Paris in colour circa 1900.

• Twilight (1983) by Pete Shelley | Twilight (2000) by Antony and the Johnsons | Twilight (2005) by Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd

Early Venetian Printing Illustrated

THE HISTORY OF THE ART OF PRINTING, studied in its most valuable examples, shows clearly how the work of the early printers took, from the very commencement, a national and also a personal character. These are recognised by the modern student in the special forms of type which they employed, and in the character of the ornaments and vignettes with which they decorated their editions; which thus formed, as it were, a species of art-work countersigned by the particular conditions of date, place and genius. Every early edition, with its various characteristics of size, type and ornamentation, is thus, not merely a trade specimen, but also an historical and artistic document, agreeing in character with the arts of design, the social customs and the literary tastes in vogue at the period in question. The early German printing, with its rigid and angular types and its Gothic ornaments, is perfectly suited to an age and to a country still mediaeval, and the Italic type of Aldus Manutius is equally suited to the calm and elegant classical character of the art of the Renaissance. Volumes with wide margins, large type and eccentric engravings tell of the pompous magnificence which found favour in the seventeenth century and of which that century has left so many specimens in our libraries.

Thus Ferdinando Ongania in Early Venetian Printing Illustrated, a tremendous collection of early print decorations, ornamental capitals, engraved illustrations and printers’ emblems. Ongania’s book was published in 1895, and once again the late 19th century is shown to be a fruitful period for this kind of early graphic history. A frequent frustration when searching through the thousands of scanned volumes at the Internet Archive is to locate plenty of books from a given period only to find that the illustrations or decorative material are sparse. Ongania’s collection dispenses with the text of the original volumes to present over 230 pages of graphics. Browse it here or download it here.

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Mazes and labyrinths

This book, Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of their History and Developments (1922) by William Henry Matthews, would have been very useful a couple of years ago when I was working on the cover design for Mike Shevdon’s The Road to Bedlam and required a labyrinth diagram. The one I used, a plan of Julian’s Bower in Alkborough, Lincolnshire, can be found below. I’ve had a lifelong interest in mazes and labyrinths so this book is fascinating beyond any temporary work requirements. Matthews’ study of the form features many diagrams going back to the legendary Cretan labyrinth and the constructions of the Ancient Egyptians. Closer to home there are depictions of the designs which flourished during the great era of landscape gardening in the 18th century, and photographs of some of Britain’s remaining turf mazes. The book may be browsed here or downloaded here.

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