Category: {books}
Books
Pasticheur’s Addiction
The Boojum Press edition of the Guide (1997).
(Frame supplied by Mark Roberts.)
A few days ago we had the CD cover meme which encourages people to create cover designs for invented groups generated by random means. In a similar vein but minus the random element there’s the growing selection of books by reclusive author Constance Eakins. A Flickr pool has been established for newly-discovered Eakins volumes and you can read more about the mysterious writer here.
This flourishing of pasticheury encourages me to post some of the cover designs I created for the various editions of The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Invented and Discredited Diseases, a fake disease guide published in 2003 and edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts. The anthology featured a host of notable contributors and was great fun to work on. Although these were done in colour, they were all printed in black & white inside the book, with a shrunken glimpse of the colour versions on the rear of the dust jacket. My jacket design wasn’t used on subsequent printings so this is the first many people will have seen of these.
The art of Boris Artzybasheff, 1899–1965
Myths of the World (1930).
Boris Artzybasheff’s humorous illustrations of anthropomorphic machines have received a lot of attention from Boing Boing recently. But Artzybasheff was a very versatile artist, not a one-trick pony, and his book and other magazine illustration is worth a look as well. These examples are from the indispensable VTS. Some of his early magazine covers brought to light here have a distinct Hannes Bok flavour.
Seven Simeons (1937).
See also:
• Artzybasheff’s Neurotica
• Artzybasheff’s Machinalia
• Another page of illustrations
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Not The Yellow Brick Road
Not The Yellow Brick Road
| Lord Horror (and one of my covers) at The Huffington Post.
Arthur Machen book covers
The House of Souls (1923).
Well, a handful anyway. The late RT Gault put a page of Machen cover scans on his book site which also included the excellent Absolute Elsewhere catalogue of “Fantastic, Visionary, and Esoteric Literature in the 1960s and 1970s”. The cover for The House of Souls is a very odd piece by Sidney Sime and going by some of Sime’s Dunsany illustrations I think this was how he thought souls actually looked. The Three Imposters (below) was part of John Lane’s Keynotes series which also included Machen’s The Great God Pan among the titles, all of which sported covers designed by Aubrey Beardsley.
The Three Imposters (1895).
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive