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The Singular & Extraordinary Tale of Mirror & Goliath

In yesterday’s post I mentioned having recently finished a cover design featuring silhouettes, not expecting the design in question to be revealed on the Barnes & Noble SF & Fantasy blog a few hours later. So here it is. The Singular & Extraordinary Tale of Mirror & Goliath is the first of two novels by Ishbelle Bee from publisher Angry Robot. Rather than attempt a précis it’s easier to swipe one from the B&N post:

1888. A little girl called Mirror and her extraordinary shape-shifting guardian Goliath Honeyflower are washed up on the shores of Victorian England. Something has been wrong with Mirror since the day her grandfather locked her inside a mysterious clock that was painted all over with ladybirds. Mirror does not know what she is, but she knows she is no longer human.

John Loveheart, meanwhile, was not born wicked. But after the sinister death of his parents, he was taken by Mr Fingers, the demon lord of the underworld. Some say he is mad. John would be inclined to agree.

Now Mr Fingers is determined to find the little girl called Mirror, whose flesh he intends to eat, and whose soul is the key to his eternal reign. And John Loveheart has been called by his otherworldly father to help him track Mirror down…

An extraordinary dark fairytale for adults, for fans of Catherynne M. Valente and Neil Gaiman.

Having spent the past few years scrutinising Victorian graphic design this was a very enjoyable assignment that didn’t feel like work at all. The title design took some time to put together, the challenge with these things being to pour on the decoration while maintaining legibility. You also need to choose the typefaces carefully. The capitals in “Mirror” and “Goliath” were drawings based on period cover designs, while the author typeface isn’t a font but is letterforms scanned from a Symbolist art book from the 1970s. Revival fonts continue to proliferate but I’ve yet to see one in that exact style. The Singular & Extraordinary Tale of Mirror & Goliath is out in June with a sequel, The Contrary Tale of the Butterfly Girl, following in August.

The Tidal Path by Watch Repair

When it comes to my work for the music world, this week has ranged from one pole to the other. On Tuesday Enki , the album whose cover I designed last year for Melechesh, was released in the US on multiple formats including coloured vinyl and (if you want the expensive option) a CD with bundled T-shirt; on Wednesday local musicians Watch Repair released The Tidal Path, a hand-crafted CD-R limited to 100 copies for which I designed the Risographed insert.

Musically you can’t compare these releases, and it would be unwise to do so, they’re both operating in very different areas. Watch Repair (who otherwise prefer to remain anonymous) have for the past two years been producing a distinct form of improvised music that combines acoustic instruments, ambient recordings and treated/processed sounds. The predominant atmosphere on The Tidal Path is winter, frozen water and icy wastes, hence the choice of an old map of the northern polar regions for the insert artwork. The map also features a few surreptitious references to related works by other artists but I’ll leave it to informed listeners to detect those. The Tidal Path is a release on Manchester’s Ono label which may be ordered from Piccadilly Records.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Watch Repair

Spare things

Cthulhu Cultus: The Sun is Sick (no date) by Austin Osman Spare.

I’ve been telling people about this drawing for years but I’ve not posted it here before. Spare produced this piece after Kenneth Grant gave him some of HP Lovecraft’s stories to read. I’ve never seen it dated but it’s probably from the mid-50s when Kenneth and Steffi Grant were corresponding with Spare and commissioning new artworks. What’s notable for me is that this is probably the first Lovecraft-derived drawing that wasn’t either a magazine or book illustration, or something done for one of the horror fanzines.

The Call of Cthulhu (1987) by John Coulthart.

Lovecraft aficionados have never seemed aware of Spare’s drawing since Lovecraft studies tended until very recently to remain fixed on popular media and the often parochial world of genre fandom. When I came to draw the swamp scene for The Call of Cthulhu in 1987 I borrowed the faces from Spare’s pillar for the column in the centre of the picture.

Bulldog Breed.

While we’re on the subject, and in the spirit of showing how all the obsessions here connect in one way or another, Phil Baker’s excellent biography of Austin Spare notes a surprising reference to the artist that predates Man, Myth and Magic via the psychedelic music scene. Bulldog Breed were a short-lived London group, one of many being promoted by the Deram label in the late 1960s. The group’s one-and-only album, Made In England, was released in 1969. The cover art is dreadful but the final song is a number entitled Austin Osmanspare [sic], a paean to the artist that turns AOS into a typical character from British psychedelia: an eccentric, oddly named, Victorian type with a sinister and mysterious glamour. According to Baker one of the band members had an aunt who knew Spare. It’s not a bad song, and the choice of magus gave them an edge over the Beatles who went for the more obvious Aleister Crowley. “They said he was before his time…”

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dreaming Out of Space: Kenneth Grant on HP Lovecraft
• MMM in IT
• Intertextuality
• Abrahadabra
• The Occult Explosion
• Murmur Become Ceaseless and Myriad
• Kenneth Grant, 1924–2011
• New Austin Spare grimoires
• Austin Spare absinthe
• Austin Spare’s Behind the Veil
• Austin Osman Spare

Summerisle souvenirs

Presenting the second in what is now a series of travel posters for the fictional regions of Old Weird Britain. In 2012 I created a poster for the village of Milbury from Children of the Stones, a design derived from the London Transport posters of the 1920s promoting destinations outside the city. At the time I had a vague idea of maybe doing more in this style but it’s taken this long to produce something new.

Summerisle is an obvious choice but not necessarily an easy one. The popularity of The Wicker Man means that a small cottage industry of Summerisle souvenirs already exists, most of the products being concerned with the events of May Day 1973. A travel poster would represent a location rather than a single date so that wasn’t a problem, but I also wanted to avoid any Wicker Man silhouettes. The appearance of the Wicker Man at the end of the film is a secret being revealed, it’s not something the islanders would broadcast to the world, hence the concentration here on the village, the manor house and the standing stones. The sole nod to the island’s customs is the group of people lurking behind a wall. Another temptation would be to use the Nuada sun as seen in the film but others have already made use of that so I took a sun face from an old Tarot card.

As with the Milbury poster, this is now a design available on a range of CafePress products. These are mostly paper goods for the time being; setting up new shops at CafePress becomes increasingly time-consuming as the company adds more yet clothing, phone cases and household goods. Among the new products, however, there’s a stainless steel flask which I wouldn’t usually add but which is perfect for a design promoting a Scottish island. I think I’ll have to order one for myself.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Wicker mania
• Milbury souvenirs
• Children of the Stones

Reworking Kraftwerk (again)

Kraftwerk (1970); Kraftwerk 2 (1972). Design by Ralf Hütter.

Recent posts about Kraftwerk’s design history had me wondering how the group might present the first three albums if these repudiated works were allowed back into the catalogue. Kraftwerk, Kraftwerk 2, and Ralf and Florian haven’t been officially reissued for decades now, and I remain sceptical that Ralf Hütter (or the recently departed Florian Schneider) are willing to taint their carefully cultivated discography with those awkward, experimental albums. This is highly unusual in the music world where everything by a commercially successful group tends to be reissued on a regular basis.

Ralf and Florian (1973). Design by Ralf Hütter & Florian Schneider. Photo by Robert Franck.

Kraftwerk are unique in this, and also in subjecting their approved releases to incremental adjustments. This was mostly strikingly seen in 2009 when the 8 albums were reissued in a box as The Catalogue. Not only had further changes been made to the cover art but two of the albums had amended titles: Electric Café was now Techno Pop (as it would have been titled if released earlier in the 1980s), and Tour De France Soundtracks had become Tour De France. The cover art changes had already been previewed in the version of The Catalogue that briefly appeared as a promo set in 2004 only now it was evident that more human traces were being removed from the albums, notably on the cover of The Man-Machine which swapped the band photo for the El Lissitzky-derived graphics. All of this needed to be taken into account when I had the idea last week of roughing out designs for how the first three albums might be reissued in a box set today.

First the title: there’s no way of knowing what Ralf Hütter might call a collected set but mundane choices like Three Albums or Kraftwerk 70–73 seem unlikely. I decided on Klingklang, the name of the first piece of music on the second album, and also the name of Kraftwerk’s studio and publishing company. This would no doubt cause endless (endless) confusion but it still seems apt. The cover design uses Futura, a German typeface that’s been a feature of many Kraftwerk graphics over the years. The oscilloscope wave is taken from the front and back cover of the double-album reissue of Kraftwerk and Kraftwerk 2 on the Vertigo label in 1972. I always liked that cover, and the graphic suits the often raw electronic sound of those albums as well as the minimal nature of the current design.

This would be the back of the proposed box, showing the albums within as The Catalogue does.

All German traffic cones still follow this standard, apparently, so the design hasn’t dated at all. (See this post for Kraftwerk’s cone obsession.) Using negative space for the white bands works well.

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