{design} – Page 168 – { feuilleton }

Escher and Schrofer

Design by Jurriaan Schrofer.

That’s Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898–1972), the Dutch artist, and Jurriaan Schrofer (1926–90), the Dutch typographer and graphic designer. Aside from a shared nationality the pair had a similar interest in periodicity and incremental metamorphosis, something that’s strikingly apparent when you compare their works. I don’t know much about Schrofer so I can’t say whether he was consciously following Escher’s example or whether this is coincidence. Some of the gradations and distortions also bear comparison with the Op Art paintings of Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely and others.

MC Escher signed most of his works with three square “MCE” letters which are remarkably similar to Schrofer’s type designs.

There’s an opportunity to find out more about Schrofer’s distinctive approach to graphic design in a forthcoming book from Unit Editions (currently available at a reduced pre-order price). More of his work can be seen at But Does It Float and scattered around Tumblr. MC Escher is well-represented on the web; I’d suggest starting at WikiPaintings.

Circle Limit I (1958) by MC Escher.

Design by Jurriaan Schrofer.

Square Limit (colour, 1964) by MC Escher.

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Covering Joyce

First editions of Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

I like Peter Mendelsund’s book cover designs so it’s good to find the designer given the opportunity to provide new covers for James Joyce. Mendelsund’s blog post announcing the news mentions nothing about his intentions, instead we have a reminiscence about Ireland à la Molly Bloom, and pictures of the three covers below.

I’ve never felt a pictorial treatment works with Joyce; his books, especially the Big Two, concentrate so much on words and the labyrinths made by language that anything other than a purely typographic treatment seems superfluous. Art directors going the pictorial route generally end up using familiar photos of the author or views of Dublin circa 1900. The first editions of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake set the pattern for many later editions, and I’ll guess it’s that pattern which Peter Mendelsund has followed here. The typeface used is Poetica, a Robert Slimbach design from 1992, completed by what may be Joyce’s own hand (I’m guessing again) in the manner of the author’s corrected typescripts. The amendments for Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist don’t require explanation but what about the title of Ulysses? I’d read this (so to speak) as representing the novel’s two main characters—Stephen Dedalus: the cold and precise man of letters, and Leopold Bloom: the all-too-human Everyman—who in their circumambulation and eventual meeting comprise the twin poles of the story. There’s also a subtle and clever allusion to Molly Bloom but I’ll let you find that…

The three new books will be published by Vintage but I’ve not managed to find a publication date.

In other Joyce news, the first Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake has proved to be a surprising bestseller. And I ought to mention that Lord Horror: Reverbstorm, my own Joycean excursion (among other things) with David Britton, is now available at Amazon. You can, of course, still buy the book direct from the publishers.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• James Joyce in Reverbstorm
• Joyce in Time
• Happy Bloomsday
• Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
• Books for Bloomsday

Cthulhu Labyrinth

Something I was working on last August when I was putting together new pictures for the Cthulhu calendar, I’d actually forgotten about this until this week. The idea was to do something that was more of an abstract design than the rest of the art; having got this far I was undecided whether I wanted to try and incorporate the labyrinth shape into a larger picture. With time running out and nothing resolved I ended up using the Keep Calm Cthulhu design which, looking back, I feel this alone could easily have replaced. (They both share the same Cthulhu glyph.) As it is I may make this one available as another CafePress design since it’s more suited to T-shirts and things. If it needs a justification then consider the story of The Call of Cthulhu as a labyrinthine investigation which reveals Cthulhu dreaming at its centre.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Weekend links 144

Ruins 3 by Rachel Thomas and Dan Tobin Smith.

“Dan wanted to do something on a really large scale and was looking at a lot of Piranesi and started talking to me about ruins. I then started looking at modern interpretations of this idea, I was obsessed with the post modern architecture of SITE, Disney fantasy settings, Busby Berkeley, Sotsass ceramics, Art Deco motifs in general, Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings, Arabic temples and on and on…” Rachel Thomas talks to Daisy Woodward about Imaginary View, an exhibition currently showing at Somerset House, London.

• A brief description of The Yokel’s Preceptor (1855), a guide to Victorian London’s gay underworld by William Dugdale. When do we get to see a facsimile of this document? The slang is a treat.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 054, a great selection by Biosphere of doomy ambience from the Post Punk/early Industrial era, 1979–1981.

Stella (Ernest Boulton) with Fanny (Frederick Park) (c. 1860–1870).

While Stella and Fanny might be the most terrible show-offs, not to mention industrious sex workers, even they drew the line at coupling in public places. Over the course of the subsequent trial, and despite bribing witnesses, the prosecution failed to prove that sodomy had ever occurred, either between the two young men themselves, or within their circle of genteel “sisters”, or even in a dark corner behind the Haymarket with a passing guardsman. Eventually, and only after a second trial a year later, the young men were found not guilty and allowed to slip back into their lives of pro-am theatricals, touring together and separately in such limp pieces as A Comical Countess and A Morning Call.

Kathryn Hughes reviews Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England by Neil McKenna. Related: photographs of the pair.

• The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale, a book of essays and a cassette tape dedicated to the television dramatist.

• Sheltered and Safe from Sorrow: “Victorian mourning rituals, tombstones, epitaphs, and other creepy things”.

• Crate digging and the resurgence of vinyl. Related: Men & Vinyl, a Tumblr devoted to men and their discs.

• Designer Shirley Tucker talks about her cover for the first edition of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

• More Will Bradley at The Golden Age (formerly Golden Age Comic Book Stories).

• The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2), a new track by The Haxan Cloak.

• Psychedelic Press UK | Related: Catnip: Egress to Oblivion?

• Paris in colour circa 1900.

• Twilight (1983) by Pete Shelley | Twilight (2000) by Antony and the Johnsons | Twilight (2005) by Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd

Early Venetian Printing Illustrated

THE HISTORY OF THE ART OF PRINTING, studied in its most valuable examples, shows clearly how the work of the early printers took, from the very commencement, a national and also a personal character. These are recognised by the modern student in the special forms of type which they employed, and in the character of the ornaments and vignettes with which they decorated their editions; which thus formed, as it were, a species of art-work countersigned by the particular conditions of date, place and genius. Every early edition, with its various characteristics of size, type and ornamentation, is thus, not merely a trade specimen, but also an historical and artistic document, agreeing in character with the arts of design, the social customs and the literary tastes in vogue at the period in question. The early German printing, with its rigid and angular types and its Gothic ornaments, is perfectly suited to an age and to a country still mediaeval, and the Italic type of Aldus Manutius is equally suited to the calm and elegant classical character of the art of the Renaissance. Volumes with wide margins, large type and eccentric engravings tell of the pompous magnificence which found favour in the seventeenth century and of which that century has left so many specimens in our libraries.

Thus Ferdinando Ongania in Early Venetian Printing Illustrated, a tremendous collection of early print decorations, ornamental capitals, engraved illustrations and printers’ emblems. Ongania’s book was published in 1895, and once again the late 19th century is shown to be a fruitful period for this kind of early graphic history. A frequent frustration when searching through the thousands of scanned volumes at the Internet Archive is to locate plenty of books from a given period only to find that the illustrations or decorative material are sparse. Ongania’s collection dispenses with the text of the original volumes to present over 230 pages of graphics. Browse it here or download it here.

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