McCallum reads Lovecraft

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Art by Leo and Diane Dillon.

RIP David McCallum, who I prefer to remember for his role as one half of the weirdest-TV-duo-ever, Sapphire and Steel. McCallum was a minor sex symbol in the 1960s, thanks to The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a celebrity that led to his conducting a series of instrumental pop albums. I’ve never heard any of these but they have their champions. They were followed in the 1970s by a number of readings for the Caedmon label which included three albums of HP Lovecraft stories. The Dunwich Horror is one I’ve referred to in the past since I used to own a knackered copy. As a reading it’s pretty good, slightly edited but with the novelty of allowing you to hear McCallum recite the famous “As a foulness shall ye know them” passage from the Necronomicon. These commissions no doubt came about simply because McCallum was available but his Lovecraft recordings gain a deeper resonance in the light of his later exploits with Joanna Lumley in the haunted corridors of Time. Some of the malign forces that Sapphire and Steel face aren’t so distant from Lovecraft’s interdimensional “Old Ones”, unfathomable entities seeking ingress to the material universe.

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Cover art uncredited.

All of the McCallum Lovecraft albums are now on YouTube so the curious may listen to the recordings without searching for rare (and expensive) vinyl:

The Rats in the Walls (1973)
The Dunwich Horror (1976)
The Haunter of the Dark (1979)

The reading of The Rats in the Walls doesn’t edit Lovecraft’s xenophobia so anyone unwilling to hear a racial epithet used as a name for a pet cat should avoid that particular recording. The first album, which included a sleeve note from August Derleth, is also the only one of the three that was reissued. I wonder whether The Dunwich Horror might have fared better if it didn’t have such appallingly amateurish cover art. A shame the Dillons weren’t able to illustrate that one as well.

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Art by Les Katz.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Haunted Corridors: The Temporal Enigmas of Sapphire and Steel

The most unusual magazine ever published: Man, Myth and Magic

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Collect the set!

I don’t really need a digital copy of Man, Myth and Magic—I’ve been the fortunate owner for many years of the bound set of original magazines you see above—but I imagine a few readers of this post will welcome a download of all 3144 pages of the 1995 edition. For the impatient I’ll put the link up front: go thou here.

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The world goes Spare: A US copy of issue no. 1 and the first volume of the 24-volume set. Austin Spare’s cover art is known either as The Elemental or The Vampires are Coming.

Man, Myth and Magic exists in several different versions along with a number of spin-off books which mined its texts for information and reused its picture archive. The first edition was the “Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural” which appeared in the UK each week from 1970 to 1971 as 112 magazine-sized issues, a series that built eventually into a collection of seven volumes. The first issue famously used a detail of a picture by Austin Osman Spare on its cover, giving Spare and his art a prominence unlike anything he received during his lifetime. The same part-work was published a couple of years later in the USA with an accompanying TV ad. Magic and the supernatural was the selling point but the encyclopedia was as much about religion and general anthropology as the occult, with the editorial stance being unsensational, factual and neutral. The seven-volume set was later republished in book form as 24 hardcover volumes, then revised in 1995 as a new set of 21 volumes with a different subtitle, “The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Mythology, Religion and the Unknown”. In the early 1970s you could also find a hardback collection of the first six issues bearing the subtitle “The most unusual book ever published”, a rather unrealistic claim. My mother bought one of these, giving me my first encounter with the encyclopedia itself and many other things besides, not least the Austin Spare drawings in Kenneth Grant’s piece of borderline cosmic horror about Spare and “resurgent atavisms”.

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Richard Cavendish was Editor-in-Chief of all the editions of Man, Myth and Magic, with Brian Innes acting as picture editor and subsequently co-editor for the 1995 edition. Cavendish had been the author of The Black Arts in 1967, a book which I still rate as one of the best general introductions to Western occultism. The Black Arts may have a title designed to grab the attention of Dennis Wheatley readers but it was a serious study that set the tone for the encyclopedia. The editorial board of Man, Myth and Magic was composed of heavyweight academics, together with John Symonds (Aleister Crowley’s literary executor and biographer), while the group of special consultants included Katharine Briggs (folklore), William Gaunt (art) and Francis Huxley (anthropology). Symonds brought Kenneth Grant on board. Grant at this time was the official head of Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis, and his presence gave the editorial team access to his large collection of Austin Spare artwork.

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“From Adam and Eve to LSD, from lucky numbers to human sacrifice…” International Times, Jan 28, 1970.

Among the never-to-be-repeated list of contributors were Geoffrey Ashe, Robert Baldick, Robert Graves, Celia Green, Douglas Hill, Christina Hole, Christopher Isherwood, Patrick Moore, Kathleen Raine and JB Rhine. Kenneth Grant and John Symonds weren’t the only contributors who’d known Aleister Crowley, there was also Tom Driberg MP, a man whose promiscuous homosexuality and alleged treachery made him one of the more notorious members of Parliament. The other British politician among the contributors was the comparatively prosaic John Selwyn Gummer, a future government minister and current member of the House of Lords. (I wish I could tell you which article was Gummer’s but he’s listed in the contributor section without a credit. I’d have to hunt through the volumes to find out.) Elsewhere you’ll find entries by both Francis Kings—confusingly listed without their identifying initials—in what may be the only time the pair appeared together in the same publication. Francis H. King, writing here about Japan, was a well-regarded author whose novels included a number of gay romances; Francis X. King was an occultist and author of non-fiction books whose research was packaged under lurid titles such as Sexuality, Magic and Perversion, and Satan and Swastika. The contents of Man, Myth and Magic have long been rendered superfluous by the internet but the contributor list gives the encyclopedia a curiosity value if nothing else. All of the entries are unique pieces of writing which are unavailable outside these pages.

I confess that I hadn’t known that Man, Myth and Magic had been revised and reprinted until I discovered this scanned edition, I’d always thought the encyclopedia was too much of its time to be republished. Richard Cavendish in the editorial preface for the 1995 edition says that some of the articles were amended or expanded to take account of new researches and developments. So they have been, although at first glance the page layout looks very much as it did in the original printing. Closer examination reveals that some of the more dated pictures have been replaced, like the photo of a typical hippy girl in the entry about bells. Dated pictures aside, what you see here is still 95% the original “illustrated encyclopedia of the supernatural”.

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Frontiers of Belief.

The most substantial change in the later reprintings was the absence of the “Frontiers of Belief” section, a series of mostly topical essays which ran each week across the inside back cover and the back of the magazine. Collectors of the volume binders could also purchase an additional binder to store the issue covers and the FoB supplements. Whoever compiled my own volumes failed to do this, but I did once own a partial set of the magazine as separate issues, and still have the FoB articles from those issues. Two of these pieces—a profile of artist Wilfried Sätty and Kenneth Grant on HP Lovecraft—have appeared here in the past. As far as I know none of the FoB pieces have ever been officially reprinted. The very last piece was “Occultism—The Future”, in which a number of writers were asked for their prognostications. The ubiquitous Dennis Wheatley—who, for once, didn’t contribute to the previous pages— delivered a typically ominous warning against involvement in the Black Arts. A more sober final word was provided by Colin Wilson:

In science a new cycle has begun, a revolt against the old rigid reductionism, a recognition that ‘materialism’ leaves half the universe unexplained. Biologists, psychologists, even physicists, are cautiously trying to feel their way into new worlds. They are acknowledging at last that they are dealing with a living universe, a universe full of strange forces. The magic of the past was an intuitive attempt to understand and control these forces: the science of the future will be a fully conscious attempt. Magic will be the science of the future, or should we say that science will be the magic of the future?

Previously on { feuilleton }
Jan Parker’s witches
Typefaces of the occult revival
Dreaming Out of Space: Kenneth Grant on HP Lovecraft
MMM in IT
The Occult Explosion
Wilfried Sätty: Artist of the occult
Owen Wood’s Zodiac

Ian Miller album covers

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Stolen Life (1988) by Rattus.

Continuing an occasional series about artists or designers whose work has appeared on record sleeves. Ian Miller’s career, which dates back to the early 1970s, has encompassed book-cover illustration, art for magazines and role-playing games, also the occasional film design. His credits in the music world, however, are limited to this handful of covers plus a few interiors, most of them for punk bands or metal outfits of one type or another. I still prefer CDs for my music listening but the 12-inch vinyl sleeve has always been the best showcase for cover art, especially the hyper-detailed renderings that are Miller’s speciality.

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Cosmovore (2018) by Ulthar.

Lovecraftian metal band Ulthar seem to have adopted Miller recently as their regular cover artist. Their Cosmovore album uses a third (?) version of Miller’s cover for the 1974 Panther Mountains of Madness paperback. (See The Art of Ian Miller for the second version.) The original is still one of my favourite Lovecraft illustrations of all, not least for the way he turns one of the relatively small and placid Elder Things into a towering kaiju—the scale can be gauged by the tiny human figures in the background—battling what appears to be an equally gigantic and frenzied shoggoth. Or maybe they’re both shoggoths since these are shape-shifting creatures? I’ve never been sure, but whatever they may be, they’re more than a match for the frenzy unleashed at the end of Lovecraft’s story.

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Bound To Mutation (1991) by Dagon.

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X-Rated Fairy Tales / Superior Catholic finger (1994) by Helios Creed.

A CD reissue of two Creed albums on Cleopatra Records. This one isn’t listed on Discogs because Miller receives no art credit.

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Providence (2020) by Ulthar.

Continue reading “Ian Miller album covers”

HP Lovecraft: Tales of Horror

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Cover design by Jo Obaroswki.

More Lovecraftiana (for a change). Today’s mail included the surprise delivery of these books, a very late arrival since the book was published over a year ago. Well better late than never, I was very pleased to be involved with this one which has been published by Fall River Press, an imprint of Barnes & Noble. The plan was to reprint a small number of Lovecraft stories on colour pages accompanied by my artwork. So the book is also a reprint of many of my earlier Lovecraftian drawings, from the comic strips to more recent illustrations, with the pictures carefully cropped and, in some places, reworked a little to match the stories.

The contents:
• Introduction by Stefan Dziemianowicz
The Call of Cthulhu
The Colour Out of Space
The Haunter of the Dark
The Whisperer in Darkness
The Dunwich Horror
The Thing on the Doorstep

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The end result is very impressive. The book is solidly bound in hard covers with the cover art featuring metallic silver ink and gloss highlights. The interior design is by Gavin Motnyk who chopped up and tinted my drawings (with my approval) in a very effective manner. Many of the panels at the end of my adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu were presented with this kind of fragmentation so I was happy to see this extended to other drawings. In addition to presenting the artwork in a new way it also helped compensate for some of the shortcomings in drawings that date back to 1986. Not everything is this old, however. I sent Gavin a copy of my redrawn R’lyeh panorama which has been printed across the endpapers.

For now this is the most substantial collection of my Lovecraft artwork in print. And since it’s being distributed by Barnes & Noble it’s also relatively easy to find (although that title, Tales of Horror, is very similar to other collections). Fall River Press will be publishing another classic horror volume featuring my illustrations towards the end of the year. More about this later.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Lovecraft archive

 

Phantastische Edelmann

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There’s more to Heinz Edelmann than the designs he created for Yellow Submarine, as Edelmann himself often used to remind people. And there’s more to his work for animated film than the Beatles’ exploits. Der Phantastische Film is a short introductory sequence for a long-running German TV series which has been doing the rounds for a number of years. Brief it may be but a couple of the monstrous details resemble those that Edelmann put into his covers for Tolkien’s books.

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Edelmann had plans to capitalise on the success of Yellow Submarine with more films like this when he set up his own animation company, Trickfilm, but the only other example is The Transformer, a short about steam trains which he designed. (The direction was by Charlie Jenkins, with animation by Alison De Vere and Denis Rich.) Given the persistent popularity of Yellow Submarine I keep hoping someone might revive its style for something new. The first animated feature directed by Marcell Jankovics, Johnny Corncob, comes close but lacks the trippy Surrealism of the Beatles film. The Japanese can certainly do trippy Surrealism (see Mind Game or Paprika) but I’ve yet to see anything that approaches the Edelmann style. Johnny Corncob, incidentally, is now available on Region B blu-ray from Eureka. It’s worth seeing but the main film in the set, Son of the White Mare, is Jankovics’s masterpiece.

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On a slightly related note, until today I hadn’t looked at ISFDB.org for Heinz Edelmann’s genre credits so I hadn’t seen this Lovecraft cover before. Hard to tell if this creature is supposed to be Cthulhu or Wilbur Whateley’s brother when The Dunwich Horror is one of the stories in the collection. Either way, it belongs in the Sea of Monsters. Insel Verlag published this one in 1968, a year before launching their special imprint devoted to fantastic literature, Bibliothek des Hauses Usher.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Return to Pepperland
The groovy look
The Sea of Monsters
Yellow Submarine comic books
Heinz Edelmann