Weekend links 389

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I Had Sweet Company Because I Sought Out None. Collage by Helen Adam.

• Readers of The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges continue to be compelled to either illustrate the impossible archive or create virtual equivalents. The Library of Blabber by nothke is a procedural version for home computers in which each volume on the shelves contains randomly-generated content.

• The Japanese American Toy Theatre of London presents: James Bonk in Matt Blackfinger (1987). Directed by Akiko Hada, with music by David Toop, and a song from Frank Chickens’ Kazuko Hohki (who also co-wrote the script).

• Music, Time and Long-Term Thinking—The Long Now Foundation (and a fair amount of Brian Eno) by Austin Brown, Alex Mensing and Ahmed Kabil.

• A Return to Normilcy: Bernie Brooks talks to post-punk group Normil Hawaiians about their 1982 album More Wealth Than Money which has just been reissued.

• Sound artist and theremin player Sarah Angliss has reworked music by Bernard Herrmann for an upcoming stage adaptation of The Twilight Zone.

• Does the world need another reissue of A Secret Wish by Propaganda? Not really but there’s a “deluxe” vinyl and CD edition on the way.

• “What Would [Bernard] Wolpe Do?” Talking Wolpe, Albertus and book cover design with the Faber & Faber Art Department.

• Mixes of the week: FACT mix 629 by Idle Hands/Chris Farrell, and XLR8R Podcast 518 by Cassy.

• At Phantasmaphile: Neglected collage artist Helen Adam (1909–1993).

Collectors’ corner: photos of book and music libraries

• The Black Meat (Deconstruction Of The Babel-Tower of Reason) (1994) by Automaton | Babel (2010) by Massive Attack feat. Martina Topley-Bird | Branching (2016) by The Library of Babel

Weekend links 380

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Night Out, Shibuya, a photograph by Yoshito Hasaka. One of a remarkable series.

• Rixdorf Editions is a new publishing venture from Strange Flowers’ James Conway which “…aims to cast light on an era which is misunderstood to the extent that it is thought of at all. I speak of the German Empire, specifically the Wilhelmine period from 1890 to 1918.” The first two titles, both translated by Conway himself, are Berlin’s Third Sex (1904), a study of the city’s queer demi monde by the pioneering Magnus Hirschfeld; and The Guesthouse at the Sign of the Teetering Globe (1917), a collection of strange stories by Franziska zu Reventlow.

• Patrick McGoohan’s enigmatic TV series, The Prisoner, premiered 50 years ago this week. Among the series’ many stylistic hallmarks was the use of Berthold Wolpe’s Albertus typeface, as detailed at We Made This.

• Three of Bill Nelson’s home-produced instrumental albums from the 1980s—Sounding The Ritual Echo, Das Kabinet, and La Belle Et La Bête—are reissued in November.

Photos by Heinrich Klaffs of German group Faust performing live (for the first time?) in 1971. Klaffs’ other photos are worth looking at as well.

• Mixes of the week: XLR8R Podcast 509 by Laylla Dane, and Secret Thirteen Mix 231 by New Hip Tiki Scene.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Altered landscapes meticulously rendered in pencil by Shinji Ogawa.

• “Why are UK and US book jackets often so different?”asks Danuta Kean.

Samantha Manzella on eight of the world’s remaining gay bookstores.

• At greydogtales: F. Marion Crawford & the Screaming Skull.

Tunnel View, a previously unheard demo by Broadcast.

Zealandia: Earth’s Hidden Continent

Seeland (1975) by Neu! | Neu Seeland (1992) by Terminal Cheesecake | Osprey’s Odyssey (2010) by Seeland

Weekend links 376

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The House by the Canal (1945) by Algernon Cecil Newton.

• RIP Tobe Hooper. Black Hole Reviews recounts the troubled history of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in Britain, a film that was given a short-lived cinema release then banned for 20 years. Elsewhere: Who sampled from Tobe Hooper’s films? Tucktonia, a model village whose London buildings were destroyed for Hooper’s Lifeforce.

• Graphic language of the wall: Rick Poynor on Brassaï’s photographs of graffiti for Le Livre de Poche. More Poynor: National Theatre Posters: A Design History is available for pre-order from Unit Editions. There’s more from the latter here.

• “A question of queer as a kind of futurism: an attitude or tendency that connects mid-20th-century performers and photographers to contemporary digital art and fashion.” Brian Dillon reviewing Queer British Art at Tate Britain.

In evolutionary terms, the intelligence of octopuses is an anomaly. The last common ancestor between octopuses on the one hand, and humans and other intelligent animals (monkeys, dolphins, dogs, crows) on the other, was probably a primitive, blind worm-like creature that existed six hundred million years ago. Other creatures that are so evolutionarily distant from humans—lobsters, snails, slugs, clams—rate pretty low on the cognitive scale. But octopuses—and to some extent their cephalopod cousins, cuttlefish and squid—frustrate the neat evolutionary division between clever vertebrates and simple-minded invertebrates. They are sophisticated problem solvers; they learn, and can use tools; and they show a capacity for mimicry, deception and, some think, humour. Just how refined their abilities are is a matter of scientific debate: their very strangeness makes octopuses hard to study. Their intelligence is like ours, and utterly unlike ours. Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.

Amia Srinivasan reviewing Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith, and The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery

Royal Academy of Arts to reveal explicit side of Dalí and Duchamp.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on The Mystic Umbrellas.

Norton Critical Edition’s Periodic Table of Literary Villains.

• Mix of the week: FACT mix 616 by Lanark Artefax.

Virus Fonts has a new website.

Little Umbrellas (1969) by Frank Zappa | Umbrellas (1971) by Weather Report | Black Umbrellas (2003) by Broadcast

The poster art of Raymond Gid

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Dresch (1928).

This weekend I was rewatching Henri-Georges Clouzot’s superb thriller, Les Diaboliques (1954) after which I went searching for the equally superb posters by Raymond Gid (1905–2000). I hadn’t really looked at the rest of Gid’s work before so this post remedies the situation with a selection from some of the many examples available online. Gid was something of a French equivalent to Saul Bass, working as a poster artist for feature films while also producing designs for advertising; like Bass he took charge of the typography as well as the illustration, always a useful thing for a poster artist. Typographies (1998), his book on the subject, is still in print.

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Vampyr (1932).

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Dr. NG Payot (1938).

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Quelque part en Europe (1948).

Continue reading “The poster art of Raymond Gid”

Typefaces of the occult revival

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Man, Myth & Magic #1, January 1970; McCall’s, March 1970.

The announcement last week of the death of British character actor Geoffrey Bayldon prompted some discussion here about the typeface used for the titles of Bayldon’s TV series from the early 1970s, Catweazle. This was a humorous drama in which the actor portrayed a warlock transplanted by a time portal from the Norman era to the present day, a comic counterpart to another occult-themed series, Ace of Wands (1970–72). Being aimed at children, both Catweazle and Ace of Wands are at the lighter end of the great flourishing of occult-related media that runs in parallel with the rise and fall of psychedelic culture, a period roughly spanning the years 1965 to 1975. The two trends reflected and fed off each other; the hippie movement stimulated interest in the occult (Aleister Crowley is on the cover of Sgt Pepper) while giving to the commercial propagators of the supernatural a range of aesthetics lifted from the 19th century.

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Muller, 1972; TIME, June 1972.

Among the graphic signifiers is a small collection of typefaces from the Victorian or Edwardian eras, designs which vanished from sight after 1920 only to surface 50 years later in very different settings to their previous deployment. I’m always fascinated by the way context changes the perception of a typeface; the repurposing of Art Nouveau fonts—which hadn’t previously been associated with diabolism—to signify witchcraft or sorcery is a good example of this. In the case of the occult revival this was partly opportunism: the commercial application of post-psychedelic style made the previously untouchable trendy again, decoration and elaborate stylisation was no longer taboo. But it was also a solution to the problem of signifying the sorcerous with typography when there were no off-the-peg solutions as there were for, say, Westerns or stories about the Space Race. As well as carrying with them a flavour of old books, some of the more curious letterforms were reminiscent of the glyphs of magical alphabets which no doubt explains their popularity.

What follows is a chronological selection of the more striking examples (or my favourites…) which conveniently begins with Ringlet, the Catweazle font. With the trend being towards Art Nouveau you find popular Nouveau styles such as Arnold Bocklin also being used in the 1970s but I’ve avoided these in favour of the less common choices.


Ringlet (1882) by Hermann Ihlenburg

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Pall Mall, 1971.

Jullian’s landmark study of the Symbolist movement isn’t an occult text but it is a great favourite of mine whose original title—Esthètes et Magiciens—puts it in the right sphere. Inside, the author touches on the spiritual concerns of many of the artists which included Theosophy and fashionable Satanism.

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Duckworth, 1973.

Aleister Crowley is represented here with the first reprinting of his erotic poetry, produced in a limited run by the venerable London house of Duckworth.

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Rise Above Records, 2016.

Blood Ceremony are Canadians devoted to the occult rock of previous decades. Their presentation matches songs with titles like The Great God Pan and Morning Of The Magicians.


Rubens (1884) by John K. Rogers

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Rubens has long been a favourite of mine even though it gets used a great deal on horror novels and the like. Many Americans also regard it as “the Haunted Mansion font” owing to its use in Disney theme parks.

Peter Haining’s collection combined supernatural fiction with short non-fiction accounts of magical operations. The cover art is the full version of the drawing by Austin Osman Spare—The Elemental aka The Vampires are Coming—seen in detail on the cover of the first issue of Man, Myth & Magic.

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Coronet Books, 1972.


Eckmann (1900) by Otto Eckmann

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Pan Books, 1969.

Many of the examples in this post tend towards the exploitational (see below…) but Cavendish’s overview of occult theory and history is a serious study, even if the cover does beckon to the Dennis Wheatley readership. My mother was among the latter which no doubt explains why she had a copy of this paperback; in due course it found its way into my hands. Richard Cavendish was enough of an authority to be hired by Purnell as editor-in-chief of Man, Myth & Magic.


Siegfried (c. 1900) by Wilhelm Woellmer

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And speaking of which…Purnell offered their readership a sidereal start to 1971.

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Man, Myth and Magic, 1970.

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Heinemann, 1977.


Pretorian (c. 1900) by PM Shanks & Sons

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NEL, 1971.

This is where things shift from anthropology, history and children’s television to Satanic exploitation and hardcore porn. “Black magic” ceremonies in previous centuries were often a kind of orgiastic cosplay so it’s no surprise to find the same thing happening in the 20th century. New English Library dominated the British book world of the 1970s with a wide range of genre novels, as well as salaciously-packaged reprints of serious occult studies by Francis King and this volume by June Johns.

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Undated.

Sexual Witchcraft and The Devil Made Me Do It are two works whose pornographic nature means their origin remains obscure; nobody seems to have any information about the latter title.

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Undated.

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Penguin, 1975.

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Symbiosis by Demdike Stare. Modern Love, 2009.

Mancunian duo Demdike Stare hark back to the heyday of Ouija boards and witchcraft with sinister electronics and the monochrome art and design of Andy Votel. Pretorian is used on all their early releases.


De Vinne Ornamental (1900) by Nicholas J. Werner

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Dell, 1978.

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Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.


Marschall (1905) by Wilhelm Woellmer

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Witchcraft magazine was a UK publication (dates unknown) whose revelatory stories ran alongside many photographs of naked ladies. There was a brief fad for this kind of thing, a diabolic counterpart to all those beefcake mags pretending to be devoted to body-building. Witchcraft did at least manage more than a single issue.

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Roberta (1962) by Robert Trogman

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Trogman’s type was based on a Belgian restaurant sign so this may be another Art Nouveau derivation. Not so the use to which it was put, however. Flaubert’s novel doesn’t feature any overt occultism (although there is a whole chapter of human sacrifice) but the cover is one of the first to establish Roberta as a signifier of the exotic/erotic .

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Berkley Medallion, 1966.

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The film equivalent of Witchcraft magazine from 1970. According to this review, Sex Rituals of the Occult also features some gay sex from the male performers, a rare thing in these boob-fests.

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Amicus Productions, 1971.


Davida (1965) by Louis Minott

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Davida is one of those typefaces from the 60s that was very popular in the following decade so it’s no surprise to find one or two occult titles using it. I’ve included it here for the way its style refers back to Ringlet, and for Abragail and Valaria’s book of recipes.

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Mattel, 1969.

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Coronet Communications, 1971.

Previously on { feuilleton }
MMM in IT
The Book of the Lost
The Occult Explosion
Forbidden volumes
The Sapphire Museum of Magic and Occultism
Occultism for kids