Weekend links 233

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Alchemical Stone (2014) by Daniel Lasso Casas. Via full fathom five.

• “I am unsure if this reality is an everyday one. We don’t know if the universe belongs to a realist genre or a fantastic one, because if, as idealists believe, everything is a dream, then what we call reality is essentially oneiric.” Jorge Luis Borges in 1984 in conversation with Argentinian poet and essayist Osvaldo Ferrari.

• “I am transgender, so ‘he’ is not appropriate and ‘she’ is problematic. I’m what I think of as pure transgender.” Antony Hegarty talks to Cian Traynor about Turning, a new DVD and album project.

Unearthing Forgotten Horrors 2014 is a weekend festival of rural weirdness at the Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Henry Darger, one of the most celebrated examples of an outsider artist (see: Vivian Girls), has been uniformly ignored by the literary firmament. Despite the success of his artwork, none of his fiction manuscripts have seen print. The language of literature is the language of privilege, in which even the stories of the working class are regularly clad in a bourgeois prose. The language of literature cannot be extricated from its white, genteel roots. Those of us without access to education are welcome to practice, but we must come in from the cold, adopt the house language. We must be civilized, scrubbed clean. Naiveté has no place in the colosseum of words.

Ravi Mangla on Coming in from the Cold: Outsider Art in Literature

Carel de Nerée tot Babberich en Henri van Booven, a collection of Beardsley-like drawings by a neglected Dutch artist.

Forever Butt is a new collection of the best of recent issues of BUTT magazine, still the best print mag for gay men.

Anne Billson’s guide to Brussels, another European city I’d like to visit some day.

• At BibliOdyssey: Schönschreibmeister, a calligraphy master’s album.

Third Ear Band live (and in colour!) on French TV in 1970.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen mix 132 by Spatial.

• The Internet Archive now has an Internet Arcade.

Crazy Cat Lady Clothing

The Pattern Library

Stone Circle (1969) by Third Ear Band | Sacred Stones (1992) by Sheila Chandra | Stoned Circular I (1996) by Coil

The beers of Pan

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Bacchus has the wine so I suppose Pan can have the beer. Back in May the blog was stalled while I was contending with various computer problems but I did manage to do some work despite the turmoil. One job was a request from Grebhan’s, a small German brewery, who wanted help altering the design of their beer label. The results can be seen above. My contribution mostly involved making a neater arrangement of the Pan piper and symbols, and also changing the fonts. Once we had Futura selected as the main typeface I put a capital G behind the Pan figure. This was subsequently made into the minimal variant you see below, the head being the one from the Pan figure enlarged.

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Earlier today Tobbi from Grebhan’s sent me a photo of the new labels. I’m very impressed with the way these have turned out, from the combination of matt and gloss to the diamond shape and the general minimal style. The black-on-black logo for the schwarzbier is a nice touch. I’m not a beer drinker (whisky, please) but if I was I’d want to try some of these.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
Green Pipes: Poems and Pictures
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
The Great God Pan
Peake’s Pan

Konx om Pax

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Not the musician but the book of “Essays in Light” published by Aleister Crowley in 1907. I’ve been familiar with this for years but only via the many reprints. It was only recently that I discovered the striking cover design of the first edition which, we’re told, was designed by Crowley himself during a hashish bout. I’ve not been able to find the source for this piece of information but it’s not in the chapter of his autobiography where he discusses the writing of the book. (Matters aren’t helped by Konx om Pax not being listed in the index.) If anyone has the relevant details then please leave a comment.

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In design terms this cover might seem radical for 1907 but if Crowley did design it I’d guess he was thinking of a quite common geometric variation of Kufic script. Crowley travelled East as far as China, and had an abiding interest in languages of all kinds. Konx om Pax opens with a quote in Arabic from the Qur’an which is followed by a succession of quotes in different languages including Hebrew, Chinese, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and hieroglyphic Egyptian.

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Konx om Pax (2011) by Fredrik Söderberg.

Crowley’s lettering turns up much later in this painting by Fredrik Söderberg. The phrase was also referenced during the 1990s on many of Bill Laswell’s recordings, often by cryptic phrasing on CD stickers. The name forms part of one of the tracks on Laswell’s Axiom Ambient album from 1994, an album which includes a sample of Crowley’s voice. Also in the 1990s, Laswell was making frequent use of what MacGregor Mathers claimed was the English translation of the Egyptian origin of the phrase: “Khabs am Pekht” or “Light in extension”. One of Laswell’s many dub projects, Divination, released two compilation albums called Light In Extension, while the phrase “Khabs am Pekht” (which had me mystified for years) appears on the back of Material’s magnificent Hallucination Engine (1994). One of my favourite albums, which also includes a portion of a Crowley Tarot card in its James Koehnline artwork.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Burroughs at 100
Aleister Crowley: Wandering The Waste
Brush of Baphomet by Kenneth Anger
Rex Ingram’s The Magician
The Mysteries of Myra
Aleister Crowley on vinyl

Two covers

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More new work of mine has been unveiled in the past few days so I can show these here. The Buried Life and Cities and Thrones are a pair of fantasy novels by new author Carrie Patel being published by Angry Robot. I was asked to provide something in an engraved style set against a black background, with imagery that reflected themes of vast, underground architecture and armed conflict.

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Vast architecture of any description is something I’ve always enjoyed, the main challenge with each book came in trying to imply the architecture and events without the pictorial content becoming incoherent. Marc at Angry Robot asked for something Piranesian where the architecture was concerned. Looking over Piranesi’s non-Carceri designs didn’t turn up anything with a suitably dramatic perspective, however, so most of what you see in the first cover comes from Giuseppe Galli Bibiena’s Architetture e Prospettive (1740). The Bibienas were a family of architects and theatrical engineers who specialised in dizzying perspective views for their stage designs; Bibiena’s book was produced to preserve some of his more celebrated designs, the originals of which are now lost. I’ve had a book of these drawings for years but this is the first opportunity I’ve had to make use of them in any kind of collage.

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This style of Baroque architecture doesn’t suit steampunk imagery which tends towards 19th-century urban/industrial; the plates are also rather staid scenes without the graphic flare that Piranesi gave to everything he rendered, real or imagined. But I do like those plunging perspectives, and pieces from two of the plates turned out to share both the same perspective and the same lighting direction. It’s easy to collage things into a flat view but creating a realistic sense of depth from bits and pieces can be tricky.

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The frame for the second cover has more of a Piranesian quality being chipped and eroded. The typography for the titles went through several changes, the versions here show a late suggestion of mine with lettering that’s probably too thin to read well at a distance (or a small size on a web page). SF Signal has a post showing the Angry Robot versions which will probably be the final ones, together with a preview of the first book.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Aldous Huxley on Piranesi’s Prisons

Dürer’s Instruction of Measurement

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Underweysung der Messung (1525), a book of drawing instruction by the great Albrecht Dürer, predates Hieronymus Rodler’s “useful booklet” by six years. This also includes some perspective work although the lessons here are mostly concerned with the careful construction of various shapes, tesselated patterns and solid figures. Two of the illustrations at the end showing an artist using drawings guides are very familiar from reproduction in numerous art books; once again it’s good to see these pictures in their original context. This is also the book in which Dürer demonstrates the construction of letters of the alphabet. His lettering guides are almost as familiar as the illustrations, they often turn up in histories of typography, and now form the basis of several font designs. Durer Caps from P22, and Durer Initials from GLC, both give you an option of construction lines or solid fills; they also supply the letter U which is missing from the artist’s alphabet. Elsewhere there’s a free font, Duerer (sic) Latin Constructions and Capitals, available from l’Abécédarienne although this design lacks the U. Dürer’s book may be browsed here or downloaded here.

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