{design} – Page 146 – { feuilleton }

Title pages

Ghost Stories and Phantom Fancies (1858) by James Hain Friswell.

The vast repository of copyright-free images from the British Library is still being sifted into Flickr sets. These are a few examples from a set of 786 title pages which range from elegant book plates to Dime Westerns and Penny Dreadfuls. A Plunge into Space is a science-fiction novel about a journey to the planet Mars in a spaceship called The Steel Globe. Robert Cromie was also the author of A New Messiah (1901), and The Crack of Doom (1895). The latter—which has some great chapter titles: The Universe A Mistake!, The Murder Club, A Telepathic Telegram—may be read here.

Vom Amazonas und Madeira (1874) by Franz Keller-Leuzinger.

Yorkshire Rivers. Reproduced from The Yorkshire Weekly Post (1890) by Tom Bradley.

A Plunge into Space (1890) by Robert Cromie.

Idylls of the King (1898) by Alfred Tennyson. Illustrated by George and Louis Rhead.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Trip to Mars

Steampunk: The Art of Victorian Futurism

Those who were wishing a few years ago that steampunk would crawl into a hole and quietly die must be gnashing their teeth at the way the sub-genre continues to flourish. (See Pinterest for examples from the increasingly wild world of steampunk fashion.) If anyone reading this is visiting Seoul in the next couple of months—or even living there—then they’ll find some of my book covers on display at Artcenter IDA. Steampunk: The Art of Victorian Futurism is a look at the wide range of steampunk aesthetics, from graphic works to three-dimensional constructions, clothing, and so on. I’d like to credit the promotional design above but I’m not sure who’s responsible. Good type design whoever it was.

Five of my covers are on display, including the three I’ve done for KW Jeter’s novels. Mr Jeter, as mentioned before, is the man who first coined the term “steampunk” in the 1980s. This isn’t the first time my artwork has appeared in South Korea—when I was painting cards for Magic: The Gathering in the 1990s there were Korean editions printed—but it is the first time anything of mine has been exhibited there. The exhibition runs to mid-May.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steampunk Calendar
• Words and pictures
• Nathanial Krill at the Time Node
• Fiendish Schemes
• Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam
• Steampunk Revolution
• The Bookman Histories
• Aether Cola
• Crafting steampunk illustrations
• SteamPunk Magazine
• Morlocks, airships and curious cabinets
• The Steampunk Bible
• Steampunk Reloaded
• Steampunk overloaded!
• More Steampunk and the Crawling Chaos
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts

Weekend links 202

Figuras Miticas: Bailarin II (1954) by Leonora Carrington.

• The 26th Annual Lambda Literary Award Finalists have been announced. Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam; Gay City: Volume 5 made the LGBT Anthology list, so congratulations to editors Evan J. Peterson & Vincent Kovar, and everyone else involved. I illustrated and designed the cover of that volume which also contains a piece of my fiction, Study in Blue, Green, and Gold.

• Music in School (1969), episode 4: “A New Sound”. Amazing BBC TV programme for schools showing children playing avant-garde compositions using bowed metal sheets, tape loops, and primitive electronic equipment. I was at school then, and can’t help but feel a little jealous. Related: Delia Derbyshire Day approaches.

• Voices Of Haiti (1953), recorded during ceremonials near Croix Des Missions and Petionville in Haiti by Maya Deren.

These days it’s hard to remember that Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl caused a bigger uproar at the Salon des Refusés of 1863 than Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, or that Monet was more influenced by Whistler than vice-versa. The delicacy of Whistler’s perceptions and his willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of harmony make for an art less bracing than that of Degas or Pissarro. And yet how much life there is in his little Thames riverscapes. Perhaps we need another major exhibition—there hasn’t been one for twenty years—to re-evaluate him.

Whistler’s Battles by Barry Schwabsky

• Mix of the week (and a very good one it is): Abandoned Edwardian Schoolhouse by The Geography Trip.

• Morton Subotnick tells Alfred Hickling how recording Silver Apples of the Moon blew his mind.

• The fantasy artwork of Ian Miller. A new book, The Art of Ian Miller, is published next month.

• Queen for a Day by Alison Fensterstock. A look at the Mardi Gras Queens of New Orleans.

• Tex Avery (1988): A 50-minute BBC documentary about the great animation director.

• The Gentle Revolutionary: Peter Tatchell talks to Joseph Burnett about Derek Jarman.

• The Soaring and Nearly Forgotten Arches of New York City.

• Dennis Hopper‘s photos of American artists in the 1960s.

• Vodun at Pinterest.

• Litanie Des Saints (1992) by Dr. John | Dim Carcosa (2001) by Ancient Rites | Far From Any Road (2003) by The Handsome Family

Heliotropic

Arriving in the post this week was a catalogue for a Maison & Objet exposition of design and decoration which includes one of my paintings among the listed “Inspirations“. The event was held in Paris at the end of January but I’ve been so busy for the past few of months I forgot to see when it was on. Not that I could have said much about it since this is a showcase event you have to attend rather than experience remotely.

Catalogues for big art and design events often tend to the lavish and expensive but the Elsewhere book is the most lavish I’ve ever encountered. The production runs the gamut of the many expensive options which modern printing can provide: metallic inks, varnish effects, iridescent and translucent sheets, embossing, die-cutting, tipped-in inserts, and variable page sizes. The inflexible icing on the cake comes in the shape of a small square of polished marble glued to one of the pages. Excess aside, the print quality is excellent, and I’m very pleased with the way my Elvis painting appears.

Sun King (1996).

Sun King was commissioned by Creation Books in 1996 as cover art for a Jeremy Reed novel which ended up being dropped by the company. The concept was the author’s, and while I’m pleased with the way it turned out I always felt it should have had more of a Gustave Moreau quality. This is the first time the picture been used anywhere although I did reuse the Elvis-in-a-Cadillac idea recently for one of the Alas Vegas Tarot cards.

My painting is included in the Heliotropic section of the book which shows some of François Bernard’s inspirations. I’m pleased they placed one of the die-cut overlays before my piece. The photos below show some of the pages from the other sections which concern the inspirations of Elizabeth Leriche—her section includes the chunk of marble—and Vincent Grégoire whose section features futurism, space scenes, metallic effects, and Daft Punk.

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Morning of the Magicians book covers

Éditions Gallimard, France, 1960.

Yesterday’s post proved popular so it seemed worthwhile taking another look at the book that birthed Planète magazine. The main problem The Morning of the Magicians presents for an art director is how to encapsulate such wildly diverse contents in a cover design. To judge from the examples here, most people seem to have either given up or gone for vaguely symbolic designs which at the most correspond to the contents in a minor way. The biggest surprise for me was seeing the cover of the first edition above, one of those typically sober French titles which gives away nothing of the intellectual fireworks within. Few of these designs have any credits, and this is nothing like a complete list (more editions may be seen at Goodreads). More recent editions have been avoided altogether since they’re pretty terrible.

Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Italy, 1963. This edition, which runs to 476 pages, includes three translated stories inserted into the text: The Nine Billions Name of God by Arthur C. Clarke, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr, and The White People by Arthur Machen.

A hardback edition showing an alchemist at work.

Stein and Day, USA, 1964.

You know a cover is failing when it could easily be applied to any number of other titles.

Continue reading “Morning of the Magicians book covers”