{horror} – Page 12 – { feuilleton }

HP Lovecraft: Tales of Horror

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

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

Necronomicon all’italiana

The 1978 edition of the Necronomicon edited by George Hay remains my favourite among the many fake Necronomica. It was the first one I bought, following a memorable “WTF?!” encounter with the Corgi paperback in WH Smiths, and as a book it’s always been better value than the much more popular “Simon” Necronomicon (1977) despite having a smaller page-count. Hay’s book is as much a general guide to Lovecraft’s fiction as an invented grimoire. In addition to the detailed occult fabulation crafted by Robert Turner and David Langford there’s a lengthy introductory essay by Colin Wilson, while the appendices comprise essays by L. Sprague de Camp (“Young Man Lovecraft”), Christopher Frayling (“Dreams of Dead Names: The Scholarship of Sleep”) and Angela Carter (“Lovecraft and Landscape”). The “Simon” book had little in the way of illustration beyond the few invented sigils which you now see reproduced endlessly in role-playing circles. The Hay book, on the other hand, featured a handful of illustrations by Gavin Stamp (all but one of them them credited to the fictitious “GM Sinclair”) which have been marooned with the essays in obscurity for far too long.

I posted some of Stamp’s illustrations several years ago but they’re worth visiting again now that an Italian translation of the Hay book has turned up at the Internet Archive. This edition, published in 1979 by Fanucci Editore, includes an additional appendix containing two more text pieces plus a portfolio section with further illustrations by Italian artists. The Italians seem to like Lovecraft’s fiction almost as much as the French do. The first substantial collection of Lovecraftian comic strips and illustrations was an Italian book, The Cosmical Horror of HP Lovecraft, published by Glittering Images in 1991. A more recent collection, Lovecraft Black and White from Dagon Press, featured a quantity of illustrations rather like those at the end of the Italian Necronomicon. The Dagon Press collection also reprinted one of my pieces but I don’t seem to have noted this until now.

The cover art for the Italian Necronomicon is worth mentioning since this isn’t a recent piece of art at all. The image is one of eleven woodcuts by Lorenz Stöer (c.1537–c.1621) which were published in book form as Geometria et Perspectiva in 1567. Happily, the 2009 BibliOdyssey post about Herr Stöer and his remarkable works is still available, so you can see the whole series and read about their history without my having to go searching for the details. Stöer’s creations are a good match for Lovecraft’s concept of deranged or non-human architecture. They remind me of Fred Chappell’s Remnants, one of the stories in Lovecraft’s Monsters, in which the Great Old Ones return to the Earth and begin to refashion the planet to their own designs.

Continue reading “Necronomicon all’italiana”

Biblio-hauntology

An invented book cover from the latest post at blissblog. Since I like fakes of this nature, especially when they’re carefully done, I had to go in search of the creator. Rachel Laine is the person responsible, and there’s more along these lines at her Flickr pages, together with many similar items from the universe next door. (I know someone who’ll appreciate all those faded magazine covers combining soft-porn photos with headlines for stories about analogue synths.) Another of the book covers is a guide to “Witches and Witch Craft”, a title whose real-life counterparts included books such as the Hamlyn guide to witchcraft and black magic from 1971. As I’m often saying, the 1970s was the witchiest decade of the 20th century.

All of which reminded me of a couple of recent inventions of my own. One of the advantages of writing here is that I can retrieve from obscurity some of the things I’d previously cast into the Malebolge formerly known as Twitter. This impromptu creation is something I threw together after Callum J posted the cover of an old I-Spy book dedicated to “The Unusual”. (If you don’t know what the I-Spy books were—and still are—Wikipedia has the history.) The screen-grab from Whistle and I’ll Come to You is a lazy choice but I wanted to surprise Callum by reworking his cover as quickly as possible.

A little more considered is this proposal for a set of British postage stamps dedicated to Nigel Kneale and his works. This one came about after a comment from Kim Newman that such a thing was overdue from the Royal Mail. Since I agreed I thought I could at least fake them into existence. They’re still a little incomplete—actual stamps would have a mention of Kneale on each one—but they look plausible. The artwork was swiped from a series of Quatermass book covers created by the prolific Karel Thole for Mondadori in the late 1970s. The images for the first Quatermass and Quatermass and the Pit work very well, I think, the fourth one less so. If I was doing these myself I’d try some combination of a radio telescope and a stone circle. Windows into another world; in the universe next door Quatermass is bigger than Star Wars. But we live here, not there.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Disciples of the Scorpion
• Ghost Box and The Infinity Box
• Llewellyn occult magazine and book catalogue, 1971
• Typefaces of the occult revival
• The Book of the Lost
• Books Borges never wrote
• Forbidden volumes

Phantastische Edelmann

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.

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.

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

Weekend links 674

The Far Side of the Moon, as photographed by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

• “It goes against centuries of traditional belief to accept that the moon is barren, that it is indifferent, that it is innocent of any role in monthly spikes in the crime rate or in the cycles of menstrual unreason. When telescopic observation had found nothing on the near side (Roger Boscovich had established by 1753 that it lacks even an atmosphere), the far side still remained a site for the projection of fantasies of a different, neighbouring world.” Justin EH Smith working his way towards a history of the dark side of the moon.

• “It shocks me that movies still lean in so hard to all these outmoded gay narrative tropes: coming out, coming of age; very identity-oriented representations of gay characters. It’s much easier to represent a gay boy who’s repressed in high school and comes out and makes friends. It’s very mainstream, and kind of played out.” Bruce LaBruce on cinematic trends in relation to his new film, a gay-porn take on Pasolini’s Teorema.

• At Cartoon Brew: Pavel Sannikau explains how he developed his own techniques of digital animation in order to create the ever-expanding Floor796.

• There’s always more Poe: Mysterium, Incubus et Terror, Poe-inspired music by a variety of artists, plus illustrations by John D. Chadwick.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: The results of a themed contest in the Close-Up Photographer of the Year Challenge.

• Mixes of the week: In Praise of the Saddest Chord at Ambientblog, and The Funky Eno Pts 2 & 3 by DJ Food.

• Steven Heller talks to Hungarian artist István Orosz about his Escher-like drawings.

• At Unquiet Things: Caitlin McCormack’s ghostly chains of knotted memory.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Intricate and organic sculptures by ceramicist Eriko Inazaki.

• New music: Illumina by Call Super with Julia Holter.

• Dark Side Of The Mushroom (1967) by The Chocolate Watchband | Dark Side Of The Star (1984) by Haruomi Hosono | On The Dark Side Of The Sun (live) (2003) by Helios Creed