A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Design
Not all the bookplates here are German, the selection includes examples from Franz von Bayros and Walter Crane. The plates are from the 1907 proceedings of the Ex Libris Association of Berlin. I’d not seen anything by Mathilde Ade before but a quick search reveals her to have been a prolific bookplate illustrator. There’s more of her work here (and that blog is also worth a browse).
Artist: Phil May (1895).
The bookplates housed at the Library of Congress aren’t all available for online viewing which is a shame when their collection includes notable examples such as these. Three of the plates here were designed by the artists whose books they identified; two of the others are for writers—Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jack London—while the sixth one is for Charlie Chaplin. The artists’ plates look like continuations of the work of their creators which makes them less interesting than those of the writers and actor, all three of which say something about the way these men saw themselves reflected in their work: the pantheon of characters from Burroughs’ fiction; Chaplin’s poor boy conquering London; and Jack London’s lone wolf daring you to try to steal his book.
Artist: Frederic Remington (between 1880? and 1909).
Artist: Studley Burroughs (between 1914 and 1922).
Bernard Quaritch’s A Collection of Facsimiles from Examples of Historic or Artistic Book-binding (1889) contains a hundred colour examples like these. Decorative boards happen to be a significant feature of some forthcoming work of my own but you’ll have to wait a while before seeing the results.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Historic Design in Printing
• Hand bookbindings
One of Faig Ahmed‘s melted Azerbaijani rugs.
• “I asked [William Burroughs] about the future of typography and he said that letterforms would go back to hieroglyphs, similar to the ancient Egyptians.” Jonathan Barnbrook discussing the thinking behind his design for blackstar, the new David Bowie album.
• “…a thick, yellow fog fills the air, sinks, crawls on the very ground; at 30 paces a house or a steam-ship look like ink-stains on blotting paper.” PD Smith review London Fog, a history of the capital’s lethal pea-soupers by Christine Corton.
• At Rue Morgue: Dejan Ognjanovic asks seven writers and editors why HP Lovecraft is still relevant. Related: big thanks to Paul Gallagher for plugging my Lovecraft calendar at Dangerous Minds.
• Some end-of-year weirdness from Moon Wiring Club: Into The Chattering Ground, a sample of the new releases available at the MWC website.
• Elaine Lustig Cohen: accidental graphic designer. Related: book covers and other designs by Elaine Lustig Cohen.
• The tomb that architect John Soane built for his wife inspired the shape of Gilbert Scott’s red telephone box.
• Mix of the week: Stephen O’Malley at the controls of Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone on BBC Radio 6.
• At Dirge Magazine: S. Elizabeth talks to Alice Rogers about art and occultism.
• Simon Callow on taking 25 years to write a three-volume life of Orson Welles.
• Todd Haynes on Cate Blanchett, Saul Leiter and Queer Cinema.
• Le Freak (1978) by Chic | Freak (2003) by LFO | Jovan Freak (Rune Lindbaek Nomaden Mix) (2012) by Georges Vert
1: The Psychedelic Snarl.
A few words in praise of Rubble, the 20-disc collection of (mostly) British psychedelic singles released by the Bam Caruso label from 1984 to 1991. A reader of Rob Chapman’s Psychedelia and Other Colours would find the Rubble series an indispensable companion to the second half of the book which explores the unique styles of British psych. Ideally you’d read the book while having these and other compilations close at hand, something I didn’t manage so I’ve been going through the discs myself this week, listening out for some of the many singles that Chapman discusses. The Rubble title is a nod to Lenny Kaye’s 1972 collection Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968, the first reappraisal of the garage/psych era whose success spawned Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964-1969, a not-so-good attempt to do the same for the UK, and Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era, 1976-1995. The original Nuggets was followed by the long-running Pebbles series which sprawls over 28 discs collecting obscure garage singles.
2: Pop-Sike Pipe Dreams.
What I like about the Rubble series, apart from its covering a favourite zone of musical history, is the way that each volume is titled in a suitable manner beyond a mere number: the title of volume 8, All The Colours Of Darkness could have been used by Coil during their LSD period. Then there’s the sleeve designs by the great Phil Smee, one of the founders of Bam Caruso, the collector of many of the featured singles, and a first-rate artisan of psychedelic graphics: there’s a Louis Wain cat on volume 2, and more of those letterforms by Roman Cieślewicz on volume 10. Smee deserves a post of his own but covering such a lengthy career would be a daunting task: Discogs lists 784 separate releases, and that’s only his design work. The design on the first run of Rubble albums was credited to “Harvey S. Williams”, a Smee pseudonym playing on the name of Elektra Records art director William S. Harvey. Harvey S. Williams was also the designer of the short-lived and rather wonderful Bam Caruso magazine, Strange Things Are Happening, issues of which are advertised in the inner sleeves of the early Rubble albums. (The magazine borrowed its title from a 1968 single by Rings and Things which is featured on Rubble 4.)
3: Nightmares In Wonderland.
The Rubble series has been reissued on CD many times, and is currently available as The Rubble Collection, a glossy cube containing all 20 discs in card sleeves together with two booklets that reprint Phil Smee’s original sleeve notes and band photos. The Rubble albums sound a little rough today when many of the songs which were taken directly from old singles have been resurrected and can be heard elsewhere in better quality. Subsequent compilations have also cherry-picked many of the better selections but this is still the ideal place to start if you want to immerse yourself in the toyshop/kitchen sink surrealism that is British psychedelia.
• See also: Richard Norris reminiscing about working at Bam Caruso, and choosing 20 favourite British psych records.
4: The 49 Minute Technicolour Dream.