{design} – Page 170 – { feuilleton }

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.

Continue reading “Early Venetian Printing Illustrated”

Weekend links 143

Ai No Corrida poster design by Egil Haraldsen (2001).

• “Back then, publishing an interview with Félix Guattari alongside little chats with rough trade and street walkers was unheard of — it still is for the most part.” BUTT on Kraximo, a gay Greek magazine of the 1980s.

• 13 books for 2013: A selection of forthcoming titles at Strange Flowers which so closely aligns with my preoccupations that I worry he’s reading my mind.

• “The Macaulay Library is the world’s largest and oldest scientific archive of biodiversity audio and video recordings.”

• A free BitTorrent Robert Anton Wilson audio and video pack. See also the RAW files at the Internet Archive.

The Pangu Building, Beijing, January 12th, 2013. Blade Runner arrives six years early.

• Wired celebrates 100 years of Edward Johnston’s typeface for the London Underground.

• Borges’ translation of Ulysses. Or of the last page of Ulysses as a translation of Ulysses.

• 0181, a new album by Four Tet, can be heard in full at SoundCloud.

• The Edge question for 2013: “What should we be worried about?”

• JG Ballard documentaries at Ubuweb.

• Unlocking Dockstader.

• RIP Nagisa Oshima.

• Ai No Corrida (1980) by Quincy Jones | Empire Of The Senses (1982) by Bill Nelson | Forbidden Colours (1983) by David Sylvian & Riuichi Sakamoto

The Eighth Court

Mid-January and here’s the first book cover design of the year, and another title for Angry Robot. This is the fourth book in Mike Shevdon‘s Courts of the Feyre series; since I’d already provided the three earlier books with a uniform design it didn’t take long to create this one. I’ve been very pleased with the reception of these covers, the positive response shows that it’s possible to design something for a fantasy series that isn’t the customary generic illustration plus florid typography. I wrote about the problems of designing fantasy covers last year with a lengthy examination of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books.

Two recent Angry Robot covers: Joey HiFi‘s cover for Chuck Wendig and Amazing15‘s Pelican-styled design for Chris F. Holm.

Credit should be given to Angry Robot’s Marc Gascoigne for encouraging this direction, the company has been producing a range of very smart covers which don’t pander to the clichés of the marketplace. There’s more of an incentive for smaller publishers to do this when small press imprints and self-publishers often have terrible cover designs (sad but true) while the multinationals play safe for fear of losing readers. If you want to stand out from the crowd then it helps to look good.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Courts of the Feyre