Peake’s Pan

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Another charity shop book-raid this week netted me a copy of Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in its 1965 Pan Books edition, one of the Bond series with great covers designed by Raymond Hawkey. The sight of the tiny Pan silhouette above reminded me that this logo was based on drawings commissioned from Mervyn Peake when the company was launched at the end of the Second World War. The design persisted for many years, usually printed on a yellow background.

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I wasn’t sure I had a copy of Peake’s original version to hand but G Peter Winnington‘s Peake biography, Vast Alchemies (2000), includes a reproduction, one of two drawings Peake produced for the publisher. The other can be seen on this Pan Books site which also reveals that Peake’s Pans were printed at quite large size on the initial run of books. The design model may have been the early Penguin style which nearly always had the famous bird prominently placed in the lower third of the cover. In book terms at least, the Penguin has proved to be the more powerful god, having survived virtually unchanged since 1935. Peake’s Pan is long gone, dropped in favour of two red squiggles.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Buccaneers #1
• Recovering Bond
• Mervyn Peake in Lilliput
• James Bond postage stamps
• Wanna see something really scary?
• T&H: At the Sign of the Dolphin

Jerry by Paul Cadmus

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Jerry (1931).

A few weeks too early for Bloomsday, this painting by Paul Cadmus was in the news this week after being acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art. The subject is Jerry French, one of the artist’s regular models and also his lover during this period. I hadn’t seen this picture before and wonder whether this is the first painted representation of Joyce’s Ulysses, a book which at the time was still banned in the USA. The ban was overturned in 1933 following some enlightened deliberation by Judge John M Woolsey.

Jerry takes its place as part of the Toledo Museum’s permanent collection next month. Via Towleroad.

• Paul Cadmus gallery at Ten Dreams

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Paul Cadmus, 1904–1999

Dimitris Yeros

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“For A Definition Of The Nude”.

After yesterday’s post I can’t resist repeating something seen at Fabulon, Thombeau and I both being cock fanatics (so to speak). Dimitris Yeros is a Greek artist and photographer whose site features a series of studies of male and female nudes juxtaposed with a variety of animals. This isn’t the only peacock photo, there’s also a female portrait and, in one of the other sections, that recurrent object of obsession, a naked man with a sword. As well as photography, Yeros presents examples of his very distinctive paintings.

While we’re on the subject of masculine eye candy, I’ve been enjoying some of the discoveries at Homotography (“Photography with homosexual tendencies”) not least their recent interview with Exterface, French masters of luscious homoerotica.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exterface

Louis Rhead’s peacocks

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La femme au paon (Woman with peacocks): from L’Estampe Moderne (1897).

Two works by British Art Nouveau poster artist and illustrator, Louis Rhead (1858–1926). The first of these is very typical and resembles many of his magazine covers of the period. The cover illustration for The Century, meanwhile, must count as the only time I’ve seen a peacock presented as a possible Christmas dish.

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The Century Christmas Number (December 1894).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peacocks
• Rene Beauclair
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Beardsley’s Salomé