{design} – Page 7 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 799

A Night Alarm: The Advance! (1871) by Charles West Cope.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Meet the artist creating humorous, nihonga-style images of daily life with their rescue cat.

• The thirteenth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

• New music: I Remember I Forget by Yasmine Hamdan; Clearwater by Maps And Diagrams.

His boss was a cards-to-his-chest type named Boynt Crosstown—and here I admit to having dropped that in as the merest excuse to revel right now in more of Pynchon’s christenings: Dr. Swampscott Vobe, Wisebroad’s Shoes, Connie McSpool, Glow Tripworth de Vasta, Cousin Begonia, “child sensation Squeezita Thickly”—for this author’s longstanding genius there on that private swivel chair of the Department of Character Appellations matches long-gone Lord Dunsany’s for imaginary gods and cities.

William T. Vollmann reviews Shadow Ticket, the new novel by Thomas Pynchon

• At Colossal: Twelve trailblazing women artists transform interior spaces in Dream Rooms.

• At Public Domain Review: Ballooning exploits in Travels in the Air (1871 edition).

• At the BFI: Josh Slater-Williams on where to begin with the films of Satoshi Kon.

• Colm Tóibín explains why he set up a press to publish László Krasznahorkai.

• At Print Mag: Ken Carbone on a pool of perfection in Paris.

• Mix of the week: Bleep Mix #310 by Rafael Anton Irisarri.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is OTC Textura.

• Ron Mael’s favourite albums.

• Shadowplay (1979) by Joy Division | Shadow (1982) by Brian Eno | Shadows (1994) by Pram

My latest cover designs have arrived in time for Spook Month, although the first of these suits the season more by association than its appearance. Jim Rockhill’s A Mind Turned in Upon Itself is a study of the work of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Ireland’s leading writer of ghost stories and Gothic fiction. This is another design for Swan River Press which adheres to the publisher’s preferred format of a dustjacket that wraps a small hardback with textured and illustrated boards. The brief was fairly straightforward, to present a rare photograph of Le Fanu in a suitably attractive manner. My initial idea was to create a frame that would reflect to some degree various aspects of Le Fanu’s fiction, but it quickly became apparent that the portrait photo was too tall and narrow to sit easily inside a frame that matched the ratio of the book. A better option was to look for a frame which could fit the shape of the book while also filling in the space around the photo.

A page from The Workshop: a Monthly Journal Devoted to Progress of the Useful Arts.

When Le Fanu was writing in the mid-19th century book design had become very lavish, with a proliferation of presentation volumes gold-blocked and embossed on their covers and spines. The Heztel editions of Jules Verne are prime examples, as are the many editions of Gustave Doré’s books. My cover is an adaptation of a German edition of Doré’s Bible which had an unusual panel in the centre that happened to be a good size and shape to accommodate the Le Fanu photo, although I still had to extend the design a little. My version also includes a pair of small Le Fanu monograms embedded in the frame.

For the board illustration I followed the form of an earlier Swan River book with an Irish theme, The Far Tower, whose boards I covered with an engraving collage. The end result, which looks like a single illustration, is a composite of two smaller illustrations from a book of views of Ireland, together with a quantity of foliage which frames the design and joins the pictures together.

The second cover is for a book I’m working on at the moment, Lovecraft’s Brood, a sequel to Tachyon’s well-received Lovecraft’s Monsters. I was very pleased to be asked to work on this one, the earlier book is a favourite of mine from among the books I’ve done for Tachyon, and Ellen Datlow is an expert at compiling well-chosen story collections. There’s not much I can say about the cover which follows the form of the previous book. As with Lovecraft’s Monsters, the framed face will also appear as one of the interior illustrations. You’ll have to wait a while to see the results of this, however. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, I’ve neglected to mention another Tachyon book whose interiors I’ve designed which is available now. The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale is a great introduction to the work of a master of horror fiction whose stories manage to be grim and witty in equal measure. Very grim at times; visceral horror is Lansdale’s forte. The collection includes his best-known story, Bubba Ho-Tep, and features cover art by another Swan River Press cover artist, Dave McKean.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lovecraft’s Monsters

Weekend links 798

Atlantis (1971) by Bartolomeu Cid dos Santos.

• “Given the workaday settings of many of his movies (a hotel, a summer camp, a science fair), their mortal stakes may come as a surprise, or at least as a paradox—yet paradox is at the heart of his entire body of work.” Richard Brody explores the New Yorker roots of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch.

• “The power of the Kelmscott Chaucer is in how all the elements harmonise to create something visually spectacular.” Michael John Goodman on William Morris and his reinvention of book design.

• At Smithsonian Mag: “What actually sparks Will-o’-the-Wisps? A new study traces the science behind the mysterious, wandering lights“.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: A chronology of 26 things with Clive Barker’s name on them and what he thinks about that.

• At Wormwoodiana: The novels of Derek Raymond and the type of crime fiction he called “The Black Novel”.

• At Colossal: Untamed flora subsumes abandoned greenhouses in Romain Veillon’s Secret Gardens.

• At The Wire: Read an extract from James Tenney: Writings and Interviews on Experimental Music.

• The Strange World of…Mulatu Astatke.

• RIP Patricia Routledge.

• The Garden (1981) by John Foxx | The Secret Garden: Main Title (1993) by Zbigniew Preisner | Secret Garden (2011) by Sussan Deyhim

Firebird, a film by Rein Raamat

There’s a Firebird of a different kind in this short film by an Estonian animator whose equally short Hell was featured here some time ago. Hell and Firebird are so stylistically opposed they look like the work of two different film-makers, although in the case of Hell this is a result of the film being based on the etchings of an Estonian artist, Eduard Wiiralt, Firebird (1974) is simpler fare, another example of the cultural fallout from The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, and a rather late one at that, not only in style but in the progress of its scenario.

Where The Beatles had Pepperland as a frozen monochrome world which has to be restored to life and colour by the Fab Four, Rein Raamat presents a monochrome city whose listless inhabitants are enlivened by the arrival in the sky of a giant coloured bird. The bird’s changing colours bring further life to the city itself; flowers and fountains burst forth, to the annoyance of a ferocious black cat who evidently preferred the earlier dispensation. As with any symbolic story made in the Soviet bloc, you can’t help but see this as a mirror for life in the world outside the cinema. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The groovy video look
• Hell, a film by Rein Raamat
• Tadanori Yokoo animations

Firebirds

Ivan Tsarevich Catching the Firebird’s Feather (1899) by Ivan Bilibin.

The firebirds are those that you find on the covers of recordings of Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet score, or on its popular distillation, The Firebird Suite. The latter has long been one of my favourite pieces of classical music, in fact it was one of the first I owned, via a cheap vinyl pairing with The Rite Of Spring that was mainly of interest for being conducted by Stravinsky himself. The cover photo showed a ballerina as the Firebird in a ballet performance, a common choice for the covers of Firebird recordings.

No artist/designer credited, 1955.

Much better was the cover of Tomita’s Firebird album (see below) which I bought around the same time, an uncredited tapestry design which is also a better album cover than the painting used on the earlier Japanese release. Depicting the Firebird itself is the other obvious choice when designing Stravinsky albums, and the dazzling, magical bird has helped this particular opus fare better in the world of classical album design than many other recordings.

No artist/designer credited, 1958.

It’s easy to cast aspersions at the designers or art directors of classical records when you see an uninspired cover design, but the format presents a number of difficulties. There’s no such thing as a fixed design for a classical album because classical albums have no fixed form. With the exception of albums devoted to a single long composition most classical albums are compilations, pairing longer works with shorter ones, often by two or more composers. This confusion of identity creates problems for the designer, as does the huge quantity of classical releases. Then there’s the problems posed by the music itself which is so often abstract; you can’t “illustrate” The Goldberg Variations. The default choice is to use a painting or a drawing or a photograph of the composer as a cover image, or a photo of the conductor or performer. The easiest assigments, as these Firebird covers demonstrate, are albums based around a composition with a well-defined theme that can be depicted visually. Nobody has ever had a problem designing a cover for recordings of Debussy’s La Mer, for example, the only difficulty is deciding what picture of the sea you want to use.

No artist/designer credited, 1960.

I’ve never had the impression that classical devotees care very much about these issues, it’s the music and the performance they’re interested in. Record labels (or their marketing departments) do seem to pay attention to visual matters now and then, and you’ll find occasional attempts to create a new line of themed covers. (The Orphic Egg series was one of the more bizarre examples from the 1970s.) Deutsche Grammophon have a history of decent cover design but even they resort to using photos of the artist or conductor far too often. I’ve never been asked to design a classical release, and I’m not sure I’d relish the task, but the problems raised by the form fascinate me. This is a subject I’ll no doubt keep returning to.

Irma Seidat, no date.

Continue reading “Firebirds”

Category: {design}

Weekend links 799

Two new covers

Weekend links 798

Firebird, a film by Rein Raamat

Firebirds