A feast of Poe

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King Pest by Alberto Martini.

My thanks to the estimable Mr Shea for bringing to my attention this website devoted to the many illustrated editions of Edgar Allan Poe. Quite a few of the older illustrations have been featured here in the past but most of the later ones are new to me. The site is comprehensive enough to include my own illustrated edition from 2017, a book whose shortcomings I often find myself apologising for. (I was very pressured for time with that commission, and would welcome an opportunity to redo some of the pictures.)

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A Descent into the Maelström by Alberto Martini.

I could draw attention to the later editions but I’ll single out the work of Alberto Martini (1876–1954), an Italian artist whose work I find especially attractive for the way it provides a bridge between Decadence and Surrealism. His Poe illustrations appear now and then in books or articles about horror fiction but you seldom see all of them together.

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The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Alberto Martini.

Meanwhile, Ted Parmelee’s short but very effective animated adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart (1953) turned up recently at the Internet Archive in a copy that’s the best I’ve seen to date. Watch it here.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Robert Lawson’s House of Usher
Edmund Dulac’s illustrated Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928
The Purloined Eidolon
Martin van Maële’s illustrated Poe
Mask of the Red Death, 1969
Narraciones extraordinarias by Edgar Allan Poe
Fritz Eichenberg’s illustrated Poe
The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrated Poe
Burt Shonberg’s Poe paintings
Illustrating Poe #5: Among the others
Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty
Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke>
Illustrating Poe #2: William Heath Robinson
Illustrating Poe #1: Aubrey Beardsley
Poe at 200
The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA
William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

02025

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Dance of Flames (1925) by Hayami Gyoshu.

Happy new year. 02025? Read this.

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Oben und Links (1925) by Wassily Kandinsky.

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Aus Torbole (1925) by Stephanie Hollenstein.

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Coronilla (1925) by Paul Nash.

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Demonstration (1925) by Franz Wilhelm Seiwert.

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The weekend artists, 2013

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“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.

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

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Pink Boy by Melinda Gebbie.

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

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

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Weekend links 154

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Collage by Chloé Poizat.

Xenis Emputae Travelling Band plays the Music of John Dee, and free at Bandcamp: Victorian Machine Music by Plinth, the “creaking, winding, piping, chiming and wood-knocking of Victorian parlour music machines”.

Jeremy Willard on Mikhail Kuzmin, “the Oscar Wilde of Russia”. Related: Conner Habib on the Disinfo podcast discussing pornography, sexuality, and whether sex be a revolutionary act.

Ed Vulliamy paid a visit to Hawkwind’s Hawkeaster festival. The Hawks’ Warrior On The Edge Of Time album is released in a remastered edition next month.

• Blasts from the past: Mahavishnu Orchestra, live in France, August 23rd, 1972, and Ashra (Manuel Göttsching & Lutz Ulbrich) in Barcelona, 1981.

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An illustration by Alberto Martini for Raw Edges (1908) by Perceval Landon.

NASA’s cover designs for Space Program manuals, guidebooks, press kits, reports and brochures.

PingMag—”Art, Design, Life – from Japan”—makes a welcome return as an active blog.

Suzanne Treister‘s Hexen 2.0 Tarot designs.

Listening to records that no longer exist

The architectural origins of the chess set

The Bohemian Realm of Absinthiana

Les sources d’une île: a Tumblr

Hammer Without A Master (1998) by Broadcast | Test Area (1999) by Broadcast | Make My Sleep His Song (2009) by Broadcast & The Focus Group

Illustrating Poe #5: Among the others

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The Conqueror Worm (c. 1900) by František Kupka.

Poe’s illustrators are legion, you could easily devote an entire blog to nothing but depictions of his stories and poems. By way of rounding off this week of posts I thought I’d point to some of the works which have caught my attention over the years, several of them being obscure enough to warrant further investigation.

František Kupka’s drawing is, as far as I can gather, one of a series based on Poe’s poem; this seems to be a related piece. As with many Symbolists artists, you can spend a great deal of time scouring the available resources to find more of their work. We’re told that one of Kupka’s more well-known paintings, The Way of Silence (1903), was inspired by the poem Dream-land.

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Berenice (1905) by Alberto Martini.

Alberto Martini (1876–1954) is a fascinating artist whose work bridges the decline of Symbolism and the rise of Surrealism. He’s also another talent whose work is woefully underrepresented on the web so let’s hope that changes soon. Wikipedia describes him as having produced 135 Poe illustrations of which only a small handful are visible online, and most of the ones that are go unlabelled. I know this one is for Berenice since I have it in a book but any Poe reader should guess the title from those blazing teeth. A few more of Martini’s drawings can be seen here.

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