Bob Haberfield: The Man and His Art

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Presenting a new book design, and a very substantial production. Bob Haberfield: The Man and His Art is a two-volume slipcased collection of the late Bob Haberfield’s drawings, paintings and illustrations, dating from his youth in Australia to his retirement in Wales. As a commercial artist, Haberfield is best known for the many cover paintings he produced in the 1970s for fantasy, horror and SF books, especially those for the Michael Moorcock novels published in the UK by Mayflower. He continued to work as a cover illustrator in the 1980s but his career encompassed album cover design during the 1960s in Australia, advertising and product illustration in Australia and Britain, and a great deal of personal work, all of which is covered here. The books were commissioned by Bob’s son, Ben Haberfield, who contributes a personal reminiscence and biographical note; the books also feature a discussion of Bob’s art by an old friend, Garry Kinnane, along with shorter pieces and remembrances by Michael Moorcock, Rodney Matthews, Peter Meerman, John Guy Collick, and John Davey.

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As for the artwork, this covers an extraordinary range of styles and media. The first volume, The Man, is Haberfield’s personal catalogue of his career, covering his days at art school in the 1960s to his years in Wales. The second volume, His Art, is the commercial work: book covers, record and magazine covers, and a large amount of product illustration for advertising, supermarkets and food companies. Haberfield was a versatile artist with a flair for imitation, something which helped his later illustrations for product packaging (biscuits, chocolates, etc) where he was often him to create paintings or drawings in very different styles. So too with his book covers, many of which have gone unidentified for years because the publishers didn’t give Haberfield a credit, while the artwork wasn’t easily identifiable as being Haberfield’s own. I’m pleased that we’ve been able to confirm that several uncredited Panther paperbacks are Haberfields.

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Genre illustrators tend to fall into two camps: the first group enjoy doing the kinds of drawing or painting that they’re requested to do for cover commissions, and are happy to do more of the same when left alone. The second group approach cover work as a job and nothing more; when left to their own devices you find them painting landscapes or portraits or whatever. Bob Haberfield was definitely in the second category. He landed in London in 1968 just as Mayflower Books was scaling up its publishing with a line of books that included UK paperback debuts of Michael Moorcock novels. Haberfield’s covers immediately stood out from Mayflower’s other books of the period, most of which were unimpressive photographic productions. Moorcock’s career took off shortly after; the Mayflower books were reprinted in larger quantities, and for a several years those books and Haberfield’s Buddhist-themed paintings were unavoidable in British bookshops. The Moorcock covers only occupy a small percentage of the pages in this collection but for many people they’ll be the main point of interest. It wasn’t possible to present all of the original paintings, many of them having been lost over the years or sold to unknown private collectors. But the collection does include a complete gallery of Haberfield’s Moorcock cover art, along with covers and original paintings for Panther (mostly horror titles), Penguin and others.

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My design for the collection is fairly restrained, the main concern having been the presentation of hundreds of individual pieces of artwork; there are 608 pages altogether, containing around 800 individual paintings and drawings. The headlines are set in various weights of Busorama, a font launched in 1970 which is a common sight in design from that decade. Putting this lot together involved considerable effort, especially on the part of co-editor/publisher John Davey. It’s good to see it out at last.

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The books are published by Jayde Design and are available here. RRP is £52 which is a lot but pretty much the standard for a two-volume slipcased set. More page samples follow below. There’s also an early review by The Outlaw Bookseller at YouTube.

Continue reading “Bob Haberfield: The Man and His Art”

Weekend links 787

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Noonday Heat (1903) by Henry Scott Tuke.

• It may still be summer but the Halloween film reissues are already being announced. This year Radiance Films is presenting two features by Belgian director Harry Kümel: the lesbian vampire drama Daughters of Darkness (UHD+BD | BD), and Malpertuis, Kümel’s adaptation of the Jean Ray fantasy novel. This week I’ve been watching Polish animated films on Radiance’s just-released Essential Polish Animation.

• At Colossal: Dennis Lehtonen documents a pair of immense icebergs paying a visit to a small Greenland village.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: ShoreZone, nine short stories by dramatist David Rudkin.

The problem is that the extraterrestrials that xenolinguists claim to seek are often beings imagined to have technologies, minds or languages similar to ours. They are projections of ourselves. This anthropomorphism risks blinding us to truly alien communicators, who are radically unlike us. If there are linguistic beings on planets such as TOI-700 d or Kepler-186f, or elsewhere in our galaxy, their modes of communication may be utterly incomprehensible to us. How, then, can xenolinguistics face its deficit of imagination?

Perhaps by re-engaging its speculative origins. Through the mode of thought characteristic of science fiction, the science of alien language might yet learn to open itself to every conceivable degree of otherness, even the possibility of beings that share nothing with us but the cosmos.

Eli K P William on problems in xenolinguistics

• DJ Food’s latest foray into pop psychedelia is a look at the psych influence on the teen romance comics of the late 1960s: part 1 | part 2 | part 3.

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – July 2025 at Ambientblog, and Bleep Mix #305 by Adam Wiltzie.

• “The hot tar splashed everywhere.” Dale Berning Sawa on Derek Jarman’s Black Paintings.

• At Unquiet Things: Meet your friendly neighbourhood art book author & book seller.

Winners of the 2025 Big Picture natural world photography competition.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty chooses 10 great heatwave films.

The closest images ever taken of the Sun’s atmosphere.

Kae Tempest’s favourite records.

Heat (1983) by Soft Cell | Heatwave (1984) by The Blue Nile | Heatwave (1987) by Univers Zero

Weekend links 785

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A 1933 poster for the second of Fritz Lang’s Mabuse films.

• Good news for those who missed the original run (from 2002–2013), Arthur Magazine is now available for the first time as a complete set of free PDFs. I was laterally involved with the magazine from the outset, mostly as a remote supporter, but I also did several covers and interior illustrations for the early issues.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler by Norbert Jacques (translated by Lilian A. Clare); and two books by J. Sheridan Le Fanu: Short Fiction, and a novella, The Room in the Dragon Volant.

• New music: Spilla by Ensemble Nist-Nah; and Sea-swallowed Wands by Jolanda Moletta and Karen Vogt.

With his compulsions for systems and architecture, his command of shadows and symbolism-imbued sets and props, Lang is never less than arresting. Yet few of the films make complete statements; Lang’s art, in this period, is seemingly as much a fugitive as are his archetypal characters. That is, until the moment that his long journey to the direct subject matter and cultural framework of the 1950s United States, addressed in the terms and by the means available to him in Hollywood, abruptly comes to superb fruition with The Big Heat.

Jonathan Lethem on Fritz Lang in Hollywood and one of the greatest noir pictures of the 1950s

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: an enthusiastic review at The Joey Zone. My thanks to Mr Shea!

• Mixes of the week: A mix for The Wire by Nina Garcia; and Isolated Mix 133 by Pentagrams Of Discordia.

• At Colossal: David Romero’s digital recreations of Frank Lloyd Wright’s unrealised buildings.

• At Smithsonian magazine: John Last investigates the history of the Tarot.

• At Planet Paul: An interview with artist Malcolm Ashman.

• At the Daily Heller: A porno gag mag with attitude.

Hodgsonia

Das Testaments Des Mabuse (1984) by Propaganda | (The Ninth Life Of…) Dr Mabuse (1984) by Propaganda | Abuse (Here) (1985) by Propaganda

Weekend links 784

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An illustration by HB Ford for The Violet Fairy Book (1906), edited by Andrew Lang.

• New music: An Aesthetic – Experiments in Tape by Hawksmoor; Leylines (2025 remaster) by Aes Dana; A Fragile Geography (10th Anniversary Reissue) by Rafael Anton Irisarri.

• “Skoda Auto designers reimagine Ferat Vampire car from cult classic 1981 Czech horror film”.

• At Colossal: Chris Ware illustrates a postwoman’s day to celebrate 250 years of USPS.

Seen today, the failure of Sorcerer looks like a grim prophecy of where the film industry would be headed in the years to come. It signaled that the creative ambitions of the New Hollywood, and its indulgence of stubborn renegade auteurs, had been cast aside for a new and dispiriting blockbuster ethos. Decades later, that ethos is still with us: a Hollywood dominated by digitally smoothed, effects-encrusted moviemaking, where every backdrop looks fake (even the real ones) and action sequences carry no physical weight. It’s a wretched landscape, and Sorcerer positively towers over it. To watch the film now, from its electric opening moments through its gaspingly bleak denouement, is to encounter something more than just a magnificent ruin or an object of cultish reclamation: a thwarted masterwork that is thwarted no longer.

Justin Chang on the bleak magic of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer.

• At the BFI: The Red Shoes wallpaper by the film’s designer Hein Heckroth.

All This Violence by Caspar Brötzmann Massaker.

• RIP Lalo Schifrin and Rebekah del Rio.

• The Strange World of…Jon Spencer.

In Ultra-Violet (1983) by Cinema 90 | Violet Ray Gas (2009) by Violet | Violetta (2012) by Demdike Stare

The art of Justin Todd

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I was pleased to find a copy of this book recently, a slim volume published in 1978 which isn’t especially rare but which usually sells for much more than the £2 I paid for it. Justin Todd is a British illustrator whose work was a familiar sight on book covers in the 1970s, especially when his commissions weren’t restricted to a single genre. Cover artists who work on fantasy novels are often asked to do horror covers (and vice versa), or edged towards science fiction when the material suits their style; Todd worked on fantasy, horror and the occasional SF title while also providing covers for mainstream novels, offbeat non-fiction, historical fiction and children’s stories. Fully-illustrated children’s books evidently became his main line of work in the 1980s—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, a collaboration with Angela Carter—which would have left him no time for cover commissions. I was amused to find him illustrating crank titles (previously) in the early 70s when he did the paperback cover for one of the great anti-crank books, John Sladek’s The New Apocrypha, a few years later.

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The Centre of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space (1972) by John C. Lilly.

Todd’s style is easy to recognise once you’ve seen a few examples: meticulous gouache renderings that tend to be slightly naive even when they’re depicting a wholly realistic story like Treasure Island. Gouache is a water-based paint that’s useful when you want a flat, even finish, but it doesn’t give you the depth of colour or contrast provided by oils or acrylics. Todd’s paintings embrace the limitations of the medium, with gradients and shadings that are so soft and diffused they might be taken at first for pencil drawings.

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The Journey to the East (1972) by Herman Hesse.

The Magical Paintings of Justin Todd isn’t a comprehensive study of Todd’s illustration work, more a snapshot of a career in progress. In addition to 64 full-page reproductions there’s a two-page interview by editor and art director Mike Dempsey which provides valuable biographical details. I was pleased to find that many of the cover paintings were ones I hadn’t seen before, including a few Arcimboldo-like faces. Todd had a flair for this kind of visual invention, constructing faces or even whole figures out of disparate objects. I’ve had a copy of The Journey to the East for many years but until this week I don’t think I’d ever looked closely at all the tiny figures making up the central figure that strides across the landscape.

Mike Dempsey maintains a blog which includes a reminiscence of working with Justin Todd.

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Stories of Five Decades (1972) by Herman Hesse.

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Secret Places of the Lion (1973) by George Hunt Williamson.

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