The interior of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County “Old Main” Building, 1874. Reblogged over the past few days on numerous Tumblr postings, none of whom had bothered to find out any details about the picture. I’m with Silent Porn Star on the contextless reblogging issue.
• Keith Richards et Mick Jagger à Londres, TV interviews with the Glimmer Twins from 1968 with some remarkable footage in the second half of Jagger filming the penultimate shot of Performance. That French video site requires further exploration. Also there is a short film from 1961 with Jacques Lasry demonstrating the Cristal Baschet. Related: Jacques Doyen & Jacques Lasry play their Cristals while Arlette Thomas and others read French poetry. I wrote something about the mystery of the Cristal two years ago this week.
• Two great album cover blogs from Jive Time Records: Project Thirty-Three is “a shrine to circles, dots, squares, rectangles and triangles, and the designers that make them come to life on album covers” while Groove Is In The Art “celebrates the era when psychedelic graphics and pop art met the mainstream”.
• At A Journey Round My Skull: Night Hallucinations: illustrations by Jaroslav Šerých for Tales of the Uncanny (Prague, 1976); Snark, Strangeness and Charm, Mahendra Singh’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll and others.
Laurence Chaves illustrates De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.
• Austin Osman Spare: Fallen Visionary at the Cuming Museum, Southwark, London in September, “will be the largest showcase of [Spare’s] work in a public museum since his death in 1956.” Jerusalem Press are publishing an expensive monograph to accompany the exhibition.
• Freeing “Pale Fire” From Pale Fire; “the next big Nabokov controversy”. Probably not but the thesis is an interesting one.
• Quintessential ‘topiary’ in Gandalf’s Garden: Barney Bubbles, head shops and Op Art graphic design.
• Monster Brains discovered some more paintings by Thomas Häfner.
• Spaceweather’s Northern Lights gallery.
• The passion of Krzysztof Penderecki.
• More Bookshelf porn.
• Sussan Deyhim: Daylaman | Desert Equations (for Brion Gysin) (with Richard Horowitz) | An interview at WorldStreams.
Several links this week via Adrian Shaughnessy’s Twitter feed. Thanks!
I wish Creation Books or Savoy or someone like this would get the rights for that ‘Tales of the Uncanny’. I am sure if I actually tracked it down, I would get some crumby trade paperback version without those gorgeous Jaroslav Šerých illustrations. I’ve always liked to hear and read transcripts of old strange tales from the lands in which they originated. Japan, Russia, and of course the British Isles, are home to some of the best examples of strange old legends successfully marketed (almost ruins their appeal) in pretty much their original form.
Over here, places that are oft thought of the ‘most haunted’ are commonly affiliated with pre-colonial, American Indian sites. There are quite a few eerie tales of this kind, whether true or not, it doesn’t always matter, and it would be nice to see some of them getting deserved attention, like a ‘Kwaidan’ of the Wild West.
Again, thank you for pointing out Jaroslav Šerých, those pictures are like a symbolist variation of Ralph Steadman.
Yeah, there’s all manner of books like that I’d like to see reissued. The problem for small publishers–as I may have said here before–is that colour printing tends to be prohibitively expensive, usually four times the cost of b&w printing. Subscription sales are one solution, as Centipede Press has shown, although that works best when the book has a potentially large audience, as Lovecraft obviously does. For obscure illustrators it would be less assured.
I’d recommend browsing Abebooks on a regular basis for some of these works. The book dealers there aren’t rip-off people and you can often find scarce titles at very reasonable prices.
Oh, and I should have mentioned Andrew Lang for a good source of folk tales. His Fairy Books (and other titles) feature all the familiar stories but also contain a number of weird or grotesque pieces. They were reprinted so often that illustrated editions still turn up at a reasonable price.