New work: Two forms of darkness

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Darkness: half-title page.

I’m still behind with site updates but here are two recent design jobs come to cast a shadow over the summer. Darkness is another fiction anthology from Tachyon, edited by Ellen Datlow and subtitled Two Decades of Modern Horror. Ann Monn’s cover design has a snake writhing through shadow so I carried the serpentine motif into the interior design. The book runs to 478 pages and, as the title implies, features lots of big names including Clive Barker, Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King.

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Darkness: title spread.

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Dark Matter, on the other hand, is a double-CD compilation of singles from Bristol’s Multiverse label which is released this month. If you need a descriptor then many of the tracks here would be classed as dubstep, and a few are doomy enough to serve as soundtracks for urban horror. Skream is one of the featured artists, and his Trapped In A Dark Bubble on Tectonic’s Plates 2 collection (which I designed last year) has a great sinister ambience.

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The design is very minimal with silver ink on a matt black digipak. The label requested graphics that mixed esoteric symbols with references to modern physics or astronomy without any of the allusions being too specific as to their origin or meaning. For the fonts I used the Fell types which take the design back to grimoires and old manuscripts.

The Book of Ornamental Alphabets

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Another short but sweet Internet Archive upload, The Book of Ornamental Alphabets (1914) by Freeman Delamotte. The designs are a variety of capitals and alphabets from medieval and later manuscripts. At least one page of this I recognise from a Pepin Press collection of similar ornamental types.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Paul Franck’s calligraphy
Gramato-graphices
John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems
Letters and Lettering
Studies in Pen Art
Flourishes

Paul Franck’s calligraphy

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Some of the most extravagantly flourished capitals you’ll see, from another of those books with an unwieldy title, Kunstrichtige Schreibart : allerhand Versalie[n] oder AnfangsBuchstabe[n] der teütschen, lateinischen und italianischen Schrifften aus unterschiedlichen Meistern der edlen Schreibkunst zusammen getragen (1655). The authors are credited as Paul Franck, Paul Fürst and Christoph Gerhard but it’s Franck’s name I know from a book of type designs, and it was a search for better examples of these letters which led me to the Internet Archive who have scans of the entire book. This is the place where European lettering design approaches the bravura elaborations of Arabic calligraphy.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
Gramato-graphices
John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems
Letters and Lettering
Studies in Pen Art
Flourishes

Weekend links 17

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Aladdin Sane (1973). Cover photo by Brian Duffy who died this week.

• Among the obituaries this week: artist Louise Bourgeois; poet and partner of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky; film director Joseph Strick, a man who dared to film James Joyce’s Ulysses; photographer Brian Duffy.

The dustbin of art history: “Why is so much contemporary art awful? We’re living through the death throes of the modernist project—and this isn’t the first time that greatness has collapsed into decadence.” Admirable sentiments but galleries and dealers have far too much invested in the corrupt edifice to let it collapse any time soon.

• Edinburgh film festival to screen ‘lost and forgotten’ British movies including the director’s cut of Jerry Cornelius film The Final Programme.

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Delectable Bawdville burlesque boy Chris “Go-Go” Harder. Via EVB who have more pics.

Homobody by Rio Safari, “a scrappy diy zine about queerness”. Obliquely related: Lizzy the Lezzie, animations at the Sundance Channel.

• Richard Norris aka Time and Space Machine puts together a psychedelic mixtape for FACT. Fab stuff.

• Diamanda Galás has a message for critics: “Stick to reviewing plant life and leave the Witches alone.”

Brion Gysin: Dream Machine will be the first US survey of Gysin’s work in NYC next month.

• Geeta Dayal’s study of Another Green World by Brian Eno reviewed at Ballardian.

• For type-heads: font anatomy wallpaper by Sigurdur Armannsson.

If it was my home: visualising the BP oil disaster.

Antony Gormley’s Breathing Room III.

The Paris Review has a new blog.

• Bizarre juxtaposition of the week: John Martyn’s sublime Small Hours with, er… The Clangers.

Two thousand

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Being post number 2,000 here at {feuilleton}. The page above is a sample from Monograms & Ciphers (1906) by AA Turbayne at the trusty Internet Archive.

I’ll take the opportunity here to apologise for the continuing flakiness of my web connection. The advantage of WordPress is independence from the shackles of Blogger and co. but this can leave you at the mercy of webhosts with inadequate or shoddy resources. I intend changing host at some point but have been far too busy of late to deal with the matter. As always, your patience is appreciated. Thanks.