{books} – Page 411 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 1

• Two covers from a new range of Penguin reprints for the AIDS awareness fund (RED), all of which are based around quotes from the books in question. Non-Format‘s stylised extract concerns the blazing red of the Count’s eyes while Coralie Bickford-Smith plays some Tom Phillips games with the text of The Secret Agent. The random circles no doubt relate to those which the doomed Stevie Verloc occupies his time in drawing. More at Caustic Cover Critic.

• Artspeak? It’s complicated. Jon Canter at The Guardian makes a blazingly obvious point which few in the art world would ever admit: that the specious pronouncements of many galleries and contemporary artists are the worst kind of bullshit.

• I helped judge the Ballardian/Savoy Microfiction competition whose winners were announced last week.

• Designer Jonathan Barnbrook enjoys Neu! and Wendy Carlos.

• Nuit Blanche, a short film by Spy Films.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Under the weather

“He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.” Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem (1984).

As well as chasing a deadline this week I’m now suffering badly from a cold, always a dismal combination if you can’t take time off. So this picture of the wonderful Jeremy Brett is all you get today. I started re-watching the 1980s Holmes TV adaptations a week or so ago and for the moment they provide an excellent means of taking the mind off clogged sinuses and sneezing fits. My earlier appraisal of the series is here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Osborne’s Dorian Gray
• The World’s Greatest Detective
• “The game is afoot!”

Margaret Armstrong book designs

Millionaire Households and their Domestic Economy (1903).

More Art Nouveau cover designs, this time by celebrated American designer Margaret Armstrong (1867–1944) whose life and work is documented here. The University of Rochester has examples of her work, as does the Atheneum of Philadelphia and the University of Alabama’s Publisher’s Bindings pages, the latter being an incredible resource for 19th and 20th century cover designs.

The Golden Key (1926).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Burroughs: The Movie

The author at home in his Bunker.

When I was writing last August about Yony Leyser’s new Burroughs documentary William S Burroughs: A Man Within I mentioned Howard Brookner’s 1983 film, Burroughs, a 90-minute study of the writer’s life and work that as a film biography remains definitive. Brookner was fortunate to capture all the surviving Beats (including Ginsberg and Gysin) and also family members like Burroughs’ son, William Jr. (who died shortly after filming), and his brother, Mortimer. If you’re interested in Burroughs and have never seen Brookner’s film it’s essential viewing, so it’s good news that Ubuweb has turned up a blurry copy (which they’ve titled Burroughs The Movie) taken from the BBC’s Arena screening shown after the writer’s death in 1997. As I recall, the beginning is slightly re-edited to make it an obituary piece but the rest of the film is complete.

Update: Ubuweb no longer hosts the film now that a reissue has been announced. The links have been removed here as a result.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive

Bradley does Beardsley

Browsing various bookbinding sites this week turned up a gorgeous cover design I hadn’t seen before by the great Will Bradley (1868–1962). The Beardsley influence is unmistakable, of course, and more pronounced than one usually sees in Bradley’s work. Richard Le Gallienne is a familiar name to scholars of the London fin de siècle scene although I can’t testify to the quality of this novel which was published in 1898, the year of Beardsley’s death. If you want to give it a go, the Internet Archive has the entire thing in its Bradley livery.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peacocks