Exposition Universelle, 1900

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La porte monumentale.

Was the Paris Exposition of 1900 the most gloriously excessive of them all? Judging by these photos it certainly looks it. I should have linked to these earlier when I had a post about the Palais du Trocadéro which was one of the buildings raised for the occasion. The Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 exposition (and was famously intended to be a temporary structure) but became the centrepiece of the 1900 fair. Wikipedia has a large plan of the entire layout and two of the halls, the Grand and Petit Palais, are still in existence and used as exhibition spaces.

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Arthur Machen book covers

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The House of Souls (1923). 

Well, a handful anyway. The late RT Gault put a page of Machen cover scans on his book site which also included the excellent Absolute Elsewhere catalogue of “Fantastic, Visionary, and Esoteric Literature in the 1960s and 1970s”. The cover for The House of Souls is a very odd piece by Sidney Sime and going by some of Sime’s Dunsany illustrations I think this was how he thought souls actually looked. The Three Imposters (below) was part of John Lane’s Keynotes series which also included Machen’s The Great God Pan among the titles, all of which sported covers designed by Aubrey Beardsley.

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The Three Imposters (1895). 

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

A postcard from Doctor Kafka

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From the German National Library, a postcard dated 1918 from Franz Kafka to his publisher, Kurt Wolff. These are press images so the links are to big scans.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka
• Kafka and Kupka