{books} – Page 472 – { feuilleton }

New things for February

Fenella Fielding, May 2005.

A few things of interest in the Coulthart world this month.

• The Independent on Sunday this weekend ran a feature by Robert Chalmers on film and stage actress Fenella Fielding which included some discussion with my Savoy colleague Dave Britton about the recordings Savoy has been making with Fenella for the past few years. I was fortunate to meet Ms Fielding myself a couple of years ago, during one of the sessions at Lisa Stansfield’s studio in darkest Rochdale, north of Manchester. As well as having the opportunity to chat to La Fielding (as Kenneth Williams used to call her), I got to take a few photos outside the studio, the best of which can be seen above. The IoS interview is an interesting one, revealing some details about Ms Fielding’s mysterious past and confirming what we knew already, that she’s not overly enamoured of her work with the ruffians from the North.

• Also in the Savoy orbit, Michael Butterworth and I were interviewed for the second number of Trespass magazine before Christmas and I’m told the issue featuring that interview has now been published although I’ve yet to see a copy. Considering I spent most of my portion of the piece ranting intemperately about the art world, that may turn out to be a good thing.

Trespass–Issue 2: January–February 2008

Alasdair Gray tells us why Lanark took so long to write and what he thinks of Gordon Brown. Savoy: a look at the obscenity trials and establishment outrage that mark this infamous publisher’s history. ‘Transgender Adventures’: a frank account of life in the sexual margins featuring Pia. ‘Not a Pursuit for a Lady’: a modern take on Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott. ‘Stop Talking and Move’: Nottingham’s parkour crew—a growing subculture. Sarah Maple: vote for her or you’re an islamaphobasexistracialist. Also the best of poetry, art and short fiction, including Catherine Smith, A. F. Harrold, Sascha Akhtar, Bernadette Cremin, David Gaffney and Anthony Cantons.

• And finally, the Savoy boys and myself receive a note of thanks in Elric: The Stealer of Souls by Michael Moorcock, one of a new series of reprints from Del Rey. Elric was and is Moorcock’s greatest fantasy character, not so much a hero as an anti-hero, and for me the early stories, which this first volume features, have always been the best. The books in this new series collect a lot of ephemeral material along with the stories (I helped source the picture of Zenith the Albino, the old pulp character Elric is based on) and all have new introductions. The intro for this volume is by Alan Moore and it’s a tremendous piece of writing. You couldn’t ask for better company.

The World’s Greatest Detective

Coralie at Penguin Books sent through these cover designs today, a splendid “collect the set” republication of the Sherlock Holmes stories which should be on the shelves early next month. This follows last year’s collection of similarly repackaged Edwardian thrillers which included Conan Doyle’s dinosaur tale, The Lost World. Having recently watched the Granada TV adaptations of the Holmes stories now would be a good time to go back to the books, especially since I only recall ever having read The Sign of Four and a couple of the stories.

And on the technical side, I’ll note that my typeface mania identifies the font used for the titles of these books as Gable Antique Condensed, a contemporary design by Jim Spiece based on a Bauer typeface from around 1900. Unless it’s one of the variants mentioned by Identifont….

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• “The game is afoot!”
• Boys Own Books

William Heath Robinson’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

I wasn’t planning on featuring William Heath Robinson again so soon but I couldn’t resist posting some extracts from his 1914 edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, another great download from the scanned books at the Internet Archive. I have a few of these illustrations in a WHR monograph but I didn’t realise the book as a whole was so good. The Robinson brothers had a remarkable mastery of space in their work, no doubt derived from Beardsley but they found a way to make his expanses of black and white work for their own distinctive styles. This book, like many of those of the period, features colour plates but I much prefer Heath Robinson’s black-and-white work to his watercolours. His Poe book contains many fine drawings but his style is more suited to this Shakespeare play, especially in the depictions of clouds of fairy figures tumbling through the air.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

At the Mountains of Madness

Going through stacks of old artwork today turned up a photocopy of a drawing I did in 1990, my sole attempt to illustrate HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. By the time I did this I was pretty exhausted by Lovecraft’s world and was already at work on the first phase of the Lord Horror comics for Savoy which explains why this is a bit half-hearted, the architecture owing more to Piranesi than anything particularly alien. I forget why I did this now, I think it was at someone’s request, and I’ve also no idea where the original drawing is. The sprawling organic cityscape/landscape I created last year for the Maison d’Ailleurs exhibition is probably closer to the kind of thing this story requires.

At the Mountains of Madness was rejected by Lovecraft’s usual publisher, Weird Tales, for not being enough of a horror story. This is true, the novella is more of a fictional travelogue, especially in its later half where a million-year-old alien city is discovered in the heart of Antarctica. Science fiction magazine Astounding took it instead where it made the cover of the February 1936 issue, the climactic shoggoth attack being painted by Howard V Brown. Poor old Lovecraft had nearly all his most famous stories published in Weird Tales, and helped give the magazine its lasting reputation, yet he was never given a cover feature during his lifetime. Astounding gave him the honour again in June of the same year for another novella, The Shadow Out of Time, also illustrated by Howard Brown.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs

Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian

Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni (c. 1616).

The Agony and the Ecstasy is an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, based around Guido Reni’s paintings of the martyr, six of which are on display.

This will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to compare directly the six masterpieces which are coming from all over the world to join the St Sebastian owned by Dulwich Picture Gallery. The paintings are coming from New Zealand, South America, Madrid, Genoa and Rome.

The claim for masterpieces is stretching the truth when art experts apparently believe that only two of the martyr paintings credited to Reni are original—the Genoa picture above and the Dulwich’s own version—the rest being later copies. The Genoa version became a favourite of Oscar Wilde and it was a Sebastian by Guido Reni that also excited the illicit passion of the 12 year-old protagonist in Yukio Mishima’s novel Confessions of a Mask. Wilde used the name Sebastian when he went into exile in Paris but he never took his identification with the saint as far as Mishima who adopted the typical pose in the famous photo taken shortly before the writer’s suicide. Wilde had no need of borrowed martyrdoms, his own was more than enough.

Yukio Mishima (1970).

The Agony and the Ecstasy runs until 11 May 2008. For further images of Saint Sebastian, this site is as comprehensive as it gets.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dorian Gray revisited
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• The art of Takato Yamamoto
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• Fred Holland Day
• The Poet and the Pope
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II