Stanisław Lem, author of Solaris.
Category: {books}
Books
City of Saints and Madmen
Jeff VanderMeer’s wonderful and award-winning fantasy tales of the sinister city of Ambergris are now back in print in the US from a major publisher. This is good to see, not only because the book is well worth your attention but also because I helped design the interior, providing title pages for the stories and designing and illustrating the whole of the ‘King Squid’ section. Fantasy is a meagre description for this book, it’s far more inventive and intelligent than the mass of works that labour under that description in the shops. Ditch your doorstop dragon sagas and give yourself a treat!
The Picture of Dorian Gray I
The original magazine publication, 1890.
Title page of the first edition, 1891.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive
Charles Méryon’s Paris
Charles Méryon (1821–1868) made his name producing etchings of the city of Paris, and became as accomplished at rendering the solidity of architecture as Piranesi. Méryon manages to do for the City of Light what Piranesi did for the Eternal City with his famous Vedute di Roma, celebrating the buildings whilst paying careful attention to the glamour of deterioration. I looked at the work of Méryon and Piranesi a great deal when embarking on my Lovecraft adaptations and still regret not buying an expensive (for the time) book of Méryon’s work in the late 1980s. Happily there are plenty of museum websites with his etchings in their collections.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive
Gay book covers
Gay on the Range (very apt name in the year of Brokeback Mountain) has a great selection of gay paperback covers from the 1950s and 60s. The one above is one of the more psychedelic examples (I was 7 years old in 1969; no one told me it was “the gay year”.) Lots of hysterical art and titles, some of them genre parodies, others delicious examples of steamy prurience that teasingly imply “exposure” of the terrible world of “the gay”. For balance, the Strange Sisters site has a similar collection of lesbian book jackets from the same period.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The book covers archive