{"id":21703,"date":"2022-06-29T16:30:13","date_gmt":"2022-06-29T15:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=21703"},"modified":"2022-07-08T11:57:13","modified_gmt":"2022-07-08T10:57:13","slug":"goodfellow-and-borges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2022\/06\/29\/goodfellow-and-borges\/","title":{"rendered":"Goodfellow and Borges"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"goodfellow1.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week’s story search<\/a> had me looking through this handful of Penguin volumes again, all of which have cover illustrations by Peter Goodfellow. These were the first Borges books I bought, beginning with the Labyrinths<\/em> collection in 1985. The Book of Sand<\/em> is two volumes in one\u2014The Book of Sand<\/em> and a late poetry collection, The Gold of the Tigers<\/em>\u2014with cover art suitable for both. I used to think that the covers of the other books were pastiching or quoting well-known artists but now I’m not so sure. Two of them definitely are quotes or pastiches: The Book of Imaginary Beings<\/em> is a play on the weird growths you find in Hieronymus Bosch, while Doctor Brodie<\/em>‘s contemplative skeleton is from the famous anatomical engravings in De Humani Corporis Fabrica<\/em> by Andreas Vesalius<\/a>, with some Chinese or Japanese landscape details added to the background.<\/p>\n

\"goodfellow2.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Two positive artistic references suggested that the other covers might follow suit, so I used to take the Labyrinths<\/em> cover as a vague reference to the anomalies that Salvador Dal\u00ed would situate in his desert vistas, while A Universal History of Infamy<\/em> was de Chirico, perhaps, although this no longer seems certain at all. Those columns look like Bernini’s double colonnade from Saint Peter’s Square in Rome, not a Turin arcade, and the picture lacks the disjunctive perspectives you find in de Chirico’s “Metaphysical” paintings. The pastiche thesis is further diluted when you discover that Goodfellow had been quoting from Bosch as far back as his cover for Ursula Le Guin’s Rocannon’s World<\/em><\/a> in 1972, while he borrowed another skeleton from Vesalius for Structures<\/em><\/a> by JE Gordon. Sometimes you can reach too far for meaningful connections.<\/p>\n

\"goodfellow3.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Bosch-like cover does seem to have had an enduring influence, however. When Penguin published the Collected Fictions<\/em> in the UK in 1999 they used a detail from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights<\/em> for the artwork. Bosch details turned up on a later edition of A Universal History of Infamy<\/em>, and have subsequently appeared on a series of Turkish Borges editions. Not a bad choice for a writer whose fictions offer universes of possibility.<\/p>\n

\"goodfellow4.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"goodfellow5.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The book covers archive<\/a>
\n\u2022 The illustrators archive<\/a><\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The Rejected Sorcerer<\/a>
\n\u2022 The Immortal by Jorge Luis Borges<\/a>
\n\u2022 Borges on Ulysses<\/a>
\n\u2022 Borges in the firing line<\/a>
\n\u2022 La Biblioth\u00e8que de Babel<\/a>
\n\u2022 Borges and the cats<\/a>
\n\u2022 Invasion, a film by Hugo Santiago<\/a>
\n\u2022 Spiderweb, a film by Paul Miller<\/a>
\n\u2022 The Library of Babel by \u00c9rik Desmazi\u00e8res<\/a>
\n\u2022 Books Borges never wrote<\/a>
\n\u2022 Borges and I<\/a>
\n\u2022 Borges documentary<\/a>
\n\u2022 Borges in Performance<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week’s story search had me looking through this handful of Penguin volumes again, all of which have cover illustrations by Peter Goodfellow. These were the first Borges books I bought, beginning with the Labyrinths collection in 1985. The Book of Sand is two volumes in one\u2014The Book of Sand and a late poetry collection, … Continue reading “Goodfellow and Borges”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New blog post: Goodfellow and Borges","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,42,27,48,44,18],"tags":[12306,693,69,12308,1483,12305,87,12307],"class_list":["post-21703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-books","category-borges","category-illustrators","category-painting","category-surrealism","tag-andreas-vesalius","tag-giorgio-de-chirico","tag-hieronymus-bosch","tag-je-gordon","tag-jorge-luis-borges","tag-peter-goodfellow","tag-salvador-dali","tag-ursula-le-guin"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-5E3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}