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Robert Louis Stevenson’s Moral Emblems

Being the owner of half the volumes in the Tusitala Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s collected works I’m not exactly unacquainted with the author’s books but this is one I hadn’t seen before. It is included in the Tusitala set (vol. 22) but this is one of the books I don’t own. The Moral Emblems & Other Poems Written and Illustrated with Woodcuts were published originally in Edinburgh Edition in 1898. The copies here are from a book edition prepared by Stevenson’s stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, in 1921. The 35 Tusitala volumes followed in 1924. Stevenson enjoyed sketching while on his travels so these crude woodcuts aren’t without precedent even if he didn’t make a habit of adding illustrations to his writing.

Emblem books were a popular form of moral instruction from the 16th century on. This particular example shares some of the pious qualities of its ancestors albeit with a wry attitude typical of its author. Regarding a man (“who might be you or me”) who pushes another into the sea, we’re told “And he will spoil his evening toddy / By dwelling on that mangled body.” The verses being written some years after Treasure Island, pirates appear in a couple of places, especially in the last sequence: Robin and Ben: Or, The Pirate and The Apothecary. The final illustrations aren’t as successful as his rough little vignettes but for someone with no reputation as a draughtsman they’re better than you’d expect. See the rest of the book here or download it here.

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The weekend artists, 2013

“Chloromgonfus detectis, a dragonfly that can detect volatile pollutants.” A speculative insect by artist Vincent Fournier.

The annual review of artists/designers/photographers featured in the weekend posts should have run at the end of December but MR James got in the way. Big thanks, and happy new year to Form is Void and Beautiful Century for pointing the way to many of these people.

Two cover designs from Eliash Strongowski’s 30 Days—30 Covers project.

Pink Boy by Melinda Gebbie.

Seam Stress (1987) by Laurie Lipton. The Drawings of Laurie Lipton is out now from Last Gasp.

The Baron in the Trees (2011), a book-cut sculpture by Su Blackwell.

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02014

Self-Portrait in Yellow Vest (1914) by Egon Schiele.

Happy new year. 02014? Read this.

Coloured Composition of Forms (1914) by August Macke.

Young Man with a Fountain Pen (1914) by Diego Rivera.

The Sawmill, December Sun (1914) by Ester Almqvist.

The Bottle of Anís del Mono (1914) by Juan Gris.

Abbeys by MR James

MR James is remembered today for his ghost stories but the four collections published during his lifetime represent a small percentage of his written work. His scholarly studies inform his stories, of course, but they also contribute to a pair of popular non-fiction books which have peripheral associations with the ghost collections: Suffolk and Norfolk: A Perambulation of the Two Counties with Notices of Their History and Their Ancient Buildings (1930) is a guide to the low-lying eastern counties where a number of the stories are set; Abbeys (1925) is a guide to the monastic ruins of the south-western counties and central England, locations which the author and his characters would enjoy visiting. This is a favourite book of mine, and one I often recommend to James enthusiasts.

Abbeys is one of a three-volume set of illustrated guides published by the Great Western Railway company in 1925, (my copy is a second edition from 1926) the other titles being Cathedrals (1924), with no author credited, and Castles (1926) by Charles Oman. The books detail the ancient attractions a traveller in Britain might wish to explore using the services of Great Western Railway. Many of the more celebrated buildings in England and Wales are covered but the lines only travel as far north as Manchester and as far east as London. In addition to photo plates and illustrations, each book contains a removable map of the rail network folded into a pocket inside the back of the book. The coloured boards (red for Abbeys, blue for Cathedrals and brown for Castles) are sturdy enough to withstand the rigours of travel.

Another of those poignant inscriptions.

Although Abbeys lacks any credits for its photos and illustrations, Cathedrals states that the photos are the work of the railway’s staff photographers while the pen-and-ink illustrations are by William M. Hendy. There’s also a credit for the typographer, William Gordon Tucker, who not only provides many fine illuminated capitals but also uses ligatures for “ct” and “st”. Abbeys has an additional feature in the form of several fold-out plans of the larger buildings.

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The Tractate Middoth

The recent interest in the BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas series has been a thing of mixed blessings, as is often the case when nostalgia fuels a reappraisal. On the one hand aficionados such as myself no longer have to hoard and swap rare tapes or video files now that the BFI has made all the films available on DVD; the interest in those films, and in similar works, has had the additional benefit of resurrecting related TV dramas and series such as Dead of Night (1972), and Leslie Megahey’s exceptional Schalcken the Painter (1979).

On the debit side, the revival of the series in 2005 has been a patchy affair, with results ranging from the very good (A View from a Hill), to the not-so-bad (Number 13), to the disgracefully bad (the 2010 adaptation of Whistle and I’ll Come to You). All these dramas continue the tradition of adapting stories by MR James, a writer whose work is now the first choice for any future stories in the series, and whose oeuvre overshadows that of other possible candidates for adaptation. Whether this last development is a good or bad one depends on your view of James’s fiction.

Sacha Dhawan among the dusty tomes.

This year we had a new James adaptation, The Tractate Middoth, written and directed by Mark Gatiss, followed by an hour-long documentary about MR James which Gatiss presented. Gatiss and his League of Gentlemen colleagues have been vocal in their enthusiasm for the British film and television ghost story, and for its literary antecedents: last year the team contributed a commentary track to the recent reissue of Blood on Satan’s Claw; League writer Jeremy Dyson has an essay in the BFI’s DVD/BR release of The Innocents; Reece Shearsmith has recorded several readings of Robert Aickman’s superb short stories; Dyson directed, and Gatiss acted in, The Cicerones (aka The Guides, 2002), an adaptation of an Aickman story. The latter was well-intentioned but a short running time combined with a very literal transcription of Aickman’s ambiguities made for a disappointing end result. The Cicerones made me apprehensive for what we might see with The Tractate Middoth but I’m pleased to report that all concerns were unfounded: Gatiss’s film is not only the best MR James adaptation since The Ash Tree (1975) but is the best film in this series since The Signalman in 1976. (Although Schalcken the Painter was screened during Christmas 1979 it wasn’t intended as a continuation of the Christmas ghost stories.) This bodes well for the future of the series, and confirms the importance of having a writer and director with a sympathy for the material.

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