Category: {books}
Books
Czech book covers
Some nice jacket designs from the Twenties and Thirties at the Smithsonian. I’ve been looking at a lot of Constructivist and Suprematist design recently and some of these come out of those styles. The Shaw jacket above was part of a series. Some of the companion designs can be seen in the excellent A2Z and More Signs by Julian Rothenstein and Mel Gooding.
Via Design Observer.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
Haunter latest
My book of Lovecraft adaptations and illustrations, The Haunter of the Dark and other Grotesque Visions (Creation Oneiros), is now available for pre-order from a number of outlets, including Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Barnes & Noble.
Publication is officially set for September 15th, 2006.
Sample pages and other news here.
“At its far edge, horror shades into beauty, and it is far beyond
that edge that Coulthart takes us, into terrible magnificence.”
Alan Moore, in the book’s introduction
“A terrific book, haunting and beautiful.
That writer from Providence would have been proud…”
Neil Gaiman
Nova Swing
The always excellent M John Harrison has a new sf novel out soon, Nova Swing, set in the same future as his masterful Light. You can read a sample of it on his website.
Harrison, along with Moorcock, Ballard, Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair, is one of Britain’s finest living writers. He’s the creator of one of my favourite fantasy cities, Viriconium, and author of a number of intelligent (and often disturbing) novels and short stories. He’s one of the few living writers equally adept at working with the big three genres—sf, fantasy and horror—whilst also being able to write straightforward “literary” fiction with far greater facility than the usual suspects that clog the Booker lists. The novels don’t come very often so a new one is an event, and something worthy of your attention.
Davy Jones
No, not the dreadful singer from The Monkees but he of the undersea locker and also the new villain in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Bill Nighy plays this splendidly-designed character, with the assistance of some CGI to get those tentacles working. I’ve still not seen the first film but the look of this makes me more interested in the series as a whole.
Aside from William Hope Hodgson‘s sea tales, the pirates plus voodoo/Sargasso Sea angle has rarely been exploited properly in fiction. Tim Powers had a go in On Stranger Tides but the results fell rather flat. In film there’s been hardly anything apart from the Hammer oddity The Lost Continent (1968), based on Uncharted Seas, a Dennis Wheatley potboiler that plundered Hodgson’s Sargasso Sea stories. The new Pirates film may be about to amend this situation; Davy Jones looks like something dreamed up after a heavy diet of Hodgson and HP Lovecraft.