{books} – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 830

Plakat Secesyjny (1971), a poster by Hubert Hilscher for an exhibition of Art Nouveau graphics.

• At Public Domain Review: Longitude by Way of Wounded Hounds: Kenelm Digby’s Sympathetick Powder (1669 edition). Two subjects familiar to readers of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.

• Miles Davis and group (Dave Liebman, Pete Cosey, Reggie Lucas, Michael Henderson, Al Foster, James Mtume) live in Stockholm in 1973. TV footage, 56 minutes.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects ten great films about forgers and fakes, while Kazuo Ishiguro compiles a list of his top ten train films.

• At Colossal: “Markus Brunetti’s monumental photos venerate European ecclesiastical landmarks”.

• Font Faces: Nick Shinn answers questions about being a type designer.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – May 2026 at Ambientblog.

• Milky Way photographer of the year 2026.

• New music: Chambers by Ruben.

• Train To Ranchipur (1959) by The Markko Polo Adventurers | One Train Load Of Dub (1974) by Tommy McCook & The Observers | Sunstroke / Mind Train (1992) by Sun Dial

Léon Carré’s In the Garden of Gems

Léonard Rosenthal’s follow-up to In the Kingdom of the Pearl was this volume with illustrations by Léon Carré. In the Garden of Gems was published in 1924 in an edition that matches the earlier book for page layout, print quality and decoration. The illustrator, Léon Carré (1878–1942), was more of a painter than a book illustrator, being one of the many Orientalist artists that France produced in the 19th century. Given the quality of his illustrations it’s a shame he didn’t work on more books, although there was a French edition of the Thousand and One Nights that he illustrated a few years later.

Rosenthal’s note to the reader describes his own book as “the study of the passionate, obstinate, cruel, and sometimes tragic struggle waged by humankind to conquer precious stones, the examination of beliefs, allegories, legends, and symbolisms…”. Individual chapters are devoted to the history of the emerald, ruby and sapphire. As with the earlier book, each chapter is embellished with a decorative header and drop cap whose details change according to the subject. This peacock obsessive approves of the profusion of pavonine motifs.

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Edmund Dulac’s In the Kingdom of the Pearl

An unusual commission for Edmund Dulac, being a work of non-fiction published in France in 1920, with a British edition following in the same year. The author, Léonard Rosenthal, was a French diamond merchant who wrote a handful of books intended to celebrate and promote his line of business, of which this was the first. In the Kingdom of the Pearl is a history of the pearl-fishing trade and the use of pearls in jewellery, decoration and storytelling. I can’t vouch for the text but the book itself is a beautiful production, with fine colour printing, and a variety of aquarian embellishments throughout. It’s common in illustrated books for the decorative details to repeat themselves but Dulac has drawn a different fishy capital for the opening page of each chapter. His colour illustrations continue the flattened style he was using in Tanglewood Tales, only here the paintings look as though he may have been aiming at the appearance of Mughal miniatures. This is a period of Dulac’s work that’s often overlooked in favour of the Rackham-like illustrations he was producing earlier in his career.

Continue reading “Edmund Dulac’s In the Kingdom of the Pearl”

Weekend links 828

Visitation (1976) by Gilbert Williams.

• “It’s the perfect storm of a UFO case.” Daniel Lavelle explores the Rendlesham Forest mystery of 1980, Britain’s own answer to the Roswell Incident. The case has more substantial documentation than most close encounters but it also has its share of conflicting reports, claims and interpretations. The truth is out there but it’s not evenly distributed.

• The Science of Spooky Sounds: Kristen French talks to researcher Rodney Schmaltz about his theory that infrasound may be responsible for the haunted feelings people experience in some buildings.

• New music: Six Organs of Admittance featuring The Six Organs Olive Choir by Six Organs of Admittance; Blue Loops by Kevin Richard Martin; Passage of Time: The Music of Michael F. Hunt by Michael F. Hunt.

• At The Daily Heller: Steven Heller on The Complete Zap Comix, an expensive reprint of the pioneering underground title coming soon from Fantagraphics.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: A Walking Flame: Selected Magical Writings of Ithell Colquhoun edited by Amy Hale.

• At Colossal: Linocuts by Eduardo Robledo celebrate Mexican heritage and community.

• Object of the week at the BFI is Vic Fair’s poster for The Man Who Fell to Earth.

• The Strange World of…Hildur Guðnadóttir.

• Wide-band WebSDR in Enschede, NL

• Lights At Rendlesham (2012) by Time Columns | Rendlesham Forest (1980) (2019) by Grey Frequency | Lights Over Woodbridge (2021) by A Farewell To Hexes

Weekend links 827

Dante in his Study with Episodes from the Inferno (1978) by Tom Phillips.

• “This set, featuring two of the surviving members of Cabaret Voltaire, is as clear and powerful as any of the live albums the group released while Richard H. Kirk was alive.” Derek Walmsley, reviewing what we’ve been told will be the last ever Cabaret Voltaire album. I can also vouch for its excellence but then I’m not what you might call an impartial listener. My copy arrived in the post only a couple of hours before Boards Of Canada made the announcement they’d been teasing for the past two weeks—the new BOC album, Inferno, will be released at the end of May—a coincidence that felt vaguely significant. “How random is random?” as William Burroughs used to say. It’s tempting to describe the moment as the passing of a creative torch but I doubt either of the groups would agree. Boards Of Canada’s approach to electronic music has always been very different to that of Cabaret Voltaire: less aggressive, more melodic, more pastoral, more concerned with memories and the past than with the present or the near future. But the promotional videos for Inferno are reminiscent of the scratch videos that Cabaret Voltaire were creating in the 1980s: degraded VHS assemblages collaged from TV broadcasts and home-movie footage, visual equivalents of a tuning dial running through the shortwave radio spectrum. Then there’s the latest BOC album art which, when taken with details from the teaser video, foregrounds the same fascination with American bastardisations of Christianity that the Cabs were referring to in Sluggin’ Fer Jesus and The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord. I’ll leave it to others to play with the interpretations that can be brought to an album title like Inferno. We’ll no doubt be seeing a great deal of journalistic musing around this and related issues before and after the end of May.

• Jiří Barta’s Expressionist animated adaptation of the Pied Piper story, Krysař (1985), has turned up in high definition at YouTube. Ignore the credit for Wilfred Jackson, an American animation director who had nothing to do with Barta’s film.

• At Public Domain Review: Magic by return of post: Allan Johnson explores the history of those mail-order occult outfits whose ads fill out the pages of the early American pulps.

• Visual Music: a lecture by Simon Reynolds describing the use of electronic music as a soundtrack for abstract cinema.

• At the BFI: Anton Bitel selects 10 great Brazilian horror films.

• There’s more intermediate eyeball fodder at Unquiet Things.

• Your Name in Landsat

• FruitierThanThou

• Disco Inferno (1976) by The Trammps | Inferno (Main Title Theme) (1980) by Keith Emerson | Om Riff From The Cosmic Inferno (2005) by IAO Chant From The Cosmic Inferno