A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Work
Much of the work I’ve been doing for the past few weeks has been steampunk-related so I’ve been searching for more antique reference material than usual. A recent delve unearthed this pair of vintage contortionists. The photograph above dates from circa 1880 and is from the George Eastman House collection at Flickr. Also at Flickr is a great set of vintage theatre posters which includes the example below. (And also at the Library of Congress.) More about the steampunk work in due course.
Arriving in the post this week was this 350-page guide to horror cinema, a Carlton Books reprint of the 2006 Andre Deutsch volume to which I contributed some 30-plus reviews and essays on Dracula, Lovecraft and occult cinema. This new printing is slightly expanded although the production is a lot less lavish than the earlier book which was a hardback with colour photos throughout. I suppose this one goes by the TV chair whereas the previous edition deserved a place on the bookshelf. I didn’t have a lot of time earlier this year to help with the updating but I did manage to write reviews of The Mist and Cloverfield, two recent horror outings I enjoyed a great deal. Despite the proliferation of online reviews there’s still a place for handy guides such as this, and I’d say that even if I wasn’t a contributor. Kim Newman is a contributing editor at Sight & Sound magazine, and both he and James Marriott have produced their own excellent guides to horror cinema. When sites like IMDB are weighed down with an opinionated rabble, an intelligent and informed counterweight is essential.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Berni Wrightson in The Mist
• Stamps of horror
• Horror comics
• Hail, horrors! hail, infernal world!
After writing about Charles J Strong’s Book of Designs a couple of days ago, it seems pertinent to point the way to a far more essential Art Nouveau design book which can also be found at the Internet Archive. Combinaisons Ornementales was a collaboration between Maurice Verneuil, George Auriol and Alphonse Mucha published in 1901, and comprises 60 plates of beautifully elegant designs (“multipliable to infinity with the aid of a mirror”) which range from Mucha’s abstractions to Verneuil’s flower motifs. The examples shown here are all by Mucha; I borrowed one of the flourishes and the peacock feather for the Dodgem Logic cover design earlier this year.
For a quick look at all the plates, the NYPL Digital Gallery has scans. Mucha produced another design book the following year, Documents Decoratifs, although I’ve yet to see an edition of that online.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Charles J Strong’s Book of Designs
• Mucha’s Zodiac
• Dodgem Logic #4
• Peacocks
It’s been a pleasure this week seeing my 1999 portrait of Cthulhu’s rotting domicile, R’lyeh, used as the cover image for Salon Futura, a new online magazine edited by Cheryl Morgan. Cheryl describes SF as “a new and hopefully somewhat different magazine devoted to the discussion of science fiction, fantasy and other forms of speculative literature.” Among the contents there’s a podcast interview with Gary K Wolfe, Nnedi Okorafor and Fábio Fernandes (the latter is a contributor to the steampunk book I’m currently designing for Tachyon); there are video interviews with writers Lauren Beukes and China Miéville, and the Guardian‘s Sam Jordison writes an appraisal of EL Doctorow’s 1994 novel The Waterworks (about New York City’s minatory Croton Reservoir) which stimulated my interest enough to make me want to search out the book. And speaking of minatory architecture, {feuilleton} approves of the presence of Taschen’s fat volume of Piranesi works spied on China Miéville’s bookshelf. China always has interesting things to say; go and see for yourself.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le horreur cosmique
Annie Duels The Sun (2010) by Angie Wang.
I’m interviewed again, this time by James at Cardboard Cutout Sundown. Covering familiar subjects for {feuilleton} readers: art history, design, Lovecraft, the genre/mainstream seesaw, etc. Related: Jeff VanderMeer previewed my design for the forthcoming Steampunk Reloaded.
• Battle over legacy of father of Art Nouveau. Prague authorities are demanding the paintings which comprise Alphonse Mucha’s Slav Epic be moved to the capital.
• The films that time forgot. David Thomson on ten neglected works including a cult favourite of mine, Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (1970).
• The Viatorium Press: “Fine letterpress printing, digital typography, and hand painted illumination.” Among their recent productions is a poem by Clark Ashton Smith.
À la conquête du pôle (1912); Georges Méliès vs. Jules Verne.
• Taxandria, a feature-length collaboration between Raoul Servais, François Schuiten and, er, Alain Robbe-Grillet, is on YouTube. My earlier post about the film is here.
• Salvagepunk, or (maybe) Post-post-modernism: “How a music micro-trend heralds an emerging, internet-enabled, aesthetic movement.” See also the latest issue of The Wire.
• Drainspotting with Remo Camerota: documenting Japan’s creative manhole covers.
• Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of squid: a book devoted to Kraken Black Spiced Rum.
• After Stanley Kubrick. Christiane Kubrick on life without Stanley K.
• Pills and penises and kissing boys: Tara Sinn’s Kaleidoscopes.
• Found Objects: a hauntological dumping ground.
• Sandow Birk’s American Qur’an.
• RIP Frank Kermode.
• Feuerland (1968) by Theo Schumann Combo; Feuerland (1977) by Michael Rother; Feuerland (2007) by Justus Köhnke.