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In the footsteps of The Soul

Adeline Carr, aka “The Soul”, wandering through the streets of Holborn while worrying about her future. Her dress is an Erté creation with curiously complicated sleeves.

After checking out of my Bloomsbury hotel on Saturday morning I decided to walk over to the nearby Atlantis Bookshop, London’s oldest occult bookseller, which is located in Museum Street close to the British Museum. I know the shop well but this visit was different since the route would take me past a number of locations mentioned in the fiction serial which runs throughout the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.

The Dweller in the Abyss is a story about “The Soul”, a young woman in the 1920s who was originally going to be a kind of occult investigator for a comic series Alan Moore and I were planning for ABC in the late 1990s. This didn’t work out for a variety of reasons but The Soul has been reborn in the new book, with her character reinvented in order to demonstrate the personal evolution of a neophyte entering the world of magic. Adeline Carr, “The Soul”, is an artist’s model who lives in the first-floor flat above the Atlantis shop. I won’t go into detail about the story, the whole thing needs to be read with the complementary material surrounding it, but Adeline’s wanderings around this quarter of the city take her to a number of well-known locations which you can visit today, and which I illustrated to a greater or lesser degree.

1: Russell Square

The first location I encountered—although my drawing of it appears near the end of the story—is the park in Russell Square, one of two such parks in the Bloomsbury area. It was raining on the morning I was there but Adeline’s walk through the park takes place on a sunny spring afternoon. The real place is rather more wooded than I showed it (there are more trees on the page which faces this one) but artistic licence is in operation here, and the park has been reorganised once or twice since the 1920s.

2: The British Museum

The next location is one I didn’t photograph, the British Museum. If it hadn’t been raining I might have walked through the gates to get a corresponding shot of the portico but the rain was heavier at this point and a large mass of umbrella-wielding tourists were crowding the entrance.

3: Museum Street

Into Museum Street and the Atlantis shop where the Bumper Book of Magic is visible in the window! This view shows the windows above the shop where Adeline lives. (Adeline’s windows aren’t a precise match but artistic licence again… Also, windows get replaced, especially after the wartime bombing that London endured.) The shop hadn’t opened yet so I walked round the corner into Bloomsbury Way to face the imposing bulk of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s church.

4: St George’s, Bloomsbury

To date, this building and Christ Church, Spitalfields, are the only Hawksmoor churches I’ve visited in person. The church is an important location in Adeline Carr’s journey into magic, being the place where her spiritual revelations begin and reach their eventual climax. The pyramid-capped tower looks slightly different to the one I was drawing. The steeple, which is based on Pliny’s description of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, was originally decorated at its base with statues of lions and unicorns but these were removed during a restoration of the building in the 1870s. Like many London buildings, the church suffered from the ravages of neglect, wartime bombing and air pollution during the 20th century (Hawksmoor’s St John, Horsleydown, was destroyed entirely during the Blitz). Restoration of St George’s began in the late 1990s, a process which included the return to the steeple of the missing lions and unicorns. (See this website.) Visiting the place this time I was hoping to get a view of the tower from the passage that runs along the side but the gate to this was locked. You can, however, see the church from the rear via a narrow road where the steeple rises over the dingy back rooms which fill out the plot.

5: The Atlantis Bookshop

And so to the Atlantis shop again. It was a genuinely magical moment seeing the book in the window after spending so much time thinking about this very location and the events that take place in the flat above. By coincidence (or is it? etc), the book sitting next to it is by Gary Lachman who I’d been with the previous evening for the book launch. After the shop had opened I talked for a while with the proprietors, showing them the place on page 39 of the Bumper Book where their establishment is mentioned. The Atlantis isn’t the only occult bookshop in London (or even the only one in Bloomsbury…Treadwell’s is nearby) but if you’re in London it should be your first port of call if you’re looking for a copy of the Bumper Book.

• The Atlantis Bookshop

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Moon and Serpent Rising
• Serious houses: The Lud Heat Tapes, 1979
• London churches of the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries
• The Cardinal and the Corpse
• Terror and Magnificence

Minotaur Ballet – Swansea Surreal

October is still Spook Month as usual but this year it’s also the 100th anniversary of the publication of André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto, something I wrote about back in January. Many events have been acknowledging the anniversary including Minotaur Ballet – Swansea Surreal, an exhibition curated by David Greenslade and Incunabula Media which will be running at Volcano Theatre, Swansea from now to the end of the month. I’m one of the contributors with prints of my Alice in Wonderland posters. Lewis Carroll’s books were rare examples of British culture that Breton was enthusiastic about—he made Alice the “Siren of Dreams” in the Surrealist card deck—while Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst both created illustrations for the stories. I would have preferred to have made something new for the event but other work intervened.

The exhibition…will feature mainly Welsh artists, most of them from Swansea, alongside guests from Australia, Ukraine, Romania, Czech Republic, Egypt, Ireland and other parts of the UK.

ARTISTS INCLUDE
George Ostafi, Mark Sanders, Alexandria Bryan, Neil Coombs, John Goodby, Ricardo Acevedo, Carla-Francesca Schoppel, Dagmar Stepankova, David Rees Davies, Matt Leyshon, Jennifer Allan, Ben Faircloth, Wynford Vaughan Thomas, James Green, David K Mitchell, John Coulthart, Ian Walker, Premysl Martinec, Roger Moss, Julia Lockheart, David Greenslade, Simon Evans, Syd Howells, Keith Bayliss, Anatoly Shmatok, Maria Dolorosa de la Cruz

FILMS OLD AND NEW BY
Kenji Siratori, Zac Ferguson, Jane Arden (Norah Morris), Ricardo Acevedo

And a special screening of Blue Scar (1949)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Scenes from a carriage
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Surrealist cartomancy

In the Mad Mountains

Cover design by Elizabeth Story. Cover art by Mike Mignola.

The subtitle tells you everything you need to know about this new collection of Joe R. Lansdale stories from Tachyon. I designed the interior of the book, less floridly than some of my previous designs for Tachyon, and a little more abstractly than I’d usually do for a title such as this. All of the stories have been published before, and since I’d illustrated one of them (for Lovecraft’s Monsters) I had vague hopes of incorporating my earlier illustration while providing new ones for the rest of the stories. This proved impossible, however; I was working on the layout while still finishing the design for The Bumper Book of Magic so didn’t have the time to do seven more drawings. I’ll post the illustration here anyway.

The Bleeding Shadow is a great story, a low-rent detective tale set in the 1920s in which the predicament from The Music of Erich Zann—violinist has to keep playing his instrument in order to keep something terrible at bay—is recast with shellac 78s and a blues guitarist. Among the other pieces there’s a story that manages to successfully contrive a meeting between Huckleberry Finn, Brer Rabbit and the Cthulhu Mythos; and the final story which gives the collection its name, wherein the setting of Lovecraft’s Antarctic epic becomes a Sargasso-like landscape of shipwrecks, lost planes and horrors great and small. I especially enjoyed The Crawling Sky, a story of the Old Weird West featuring a Solomon Kane-like itinerant preacher, the Reverend Jebidiah Mercer. Lansdale’s grotesque humour is to the fore in this one. I’d like to see the Reverend given a collection of his own someday.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Things Get Ugly
• Lovecraft’s Monsters

In Carcosa

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink beneath the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.

The King in Yellow, Act i, Scene 2

It’s been a while since I posted anything here which has been created solely for myself rather than a commission. This new piece is a portrait of the King in Yellow, the sinister regent whose supernatural presence pervades the four weird tales that open Robert W. Chambers story collection of the same name. The drawing is a big one, big enough to fill an A2 sheet which I was intending to make available in print form at Etsy. Not having looked at my Etsy shops for a while I didn’t know that they’d changed the shipping section to such an extent that I’d be having to guess what the shipping rates were for different regions. The printer I use has rough guidelines for setting shipping costs on external sales sites but not in the detail that Etsy requires. Prints of this picture may still be ordered direct from me, however. A2 or A3 giclée on Hahnemühle Pearl paper; send me an email if you’re interested.

To return to the artwork… Prior to this my sole drawing of Chambers’ King was for one of the illustrations in Lovecraft’s Monsters, but that depiction is only a reflection in a pub mirror. The new piece was the result of a number of impulses which coalesced after I’d finished work on the forthcoming Bumper Book of Magic. I’d been doing a lot of drawing for the book—there’s a 20-page section, for example, which is all full-page, colour illustrations—and I wanted to keep my hand in while working on the current round of design-related projects. I’d also been wanting to try a proper depiction of the King in Yellow for some time, the previous attempt being unsatisfying even when detached from its pub scene. I’d reworked the earlier drawing a while ago after a Chinese publisher asked for a couple of illustrations for a Chinese edition of Chambers’ book. They paid me for the drawing, and for an old painting which I’d titled The King in Yellow but I still don’t know if the pictures were used anywhere.

A promotional poster by Robert W. Chambers, circa 1895.

A more general impulse has been the urge to get back to doing things for myself when I have the time. Time is always the problem when you’re engaged in commercial work. This new piece has been worked on over a series of months, chipping away at weekends and the ends of the working day. I had the idea at first of following Chambers’ own drawing of the King fairly closely, wings and all, but I’ve never been sure whether the wings are meant to be real appendages or symbolic shapes like the halo that Chambers also draws. The same goes for the guttering torch which the figure holds upside down, and which was used as a decoration on the spine of the third printing of the book.

Among the other details, the Art Nouveau border is intended to connect the drawing to the 1890s, the decade in which the stories were written, but for the architecture I wanted something more severe and less earthbound. Most of the architectural design is my own but the arches are a variation on the vestibule that Peter Behrens designed for the German pavilion at the 1902 Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna in Turin. Behrens started out working in the Jugendstil mode but soon evolved a style of his own which prefigures the stylings of Art Deco. The inscription on the steps is Cassilda’s Song, a page of verse which opens the first story in Chambers’ book, The Repairer of Reputations. The words have been set in the Lingua ignota alphabet devised by Hildegard von Bingen. In the past I might have used the alphabet from The Voynich Manuscript but I like the appearance of Hildegard’s lettering even though I doubt she’d approve of this usage.

• The King in Yellow at Standard Ebooks

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Eldritch idols
• In the Key of Yellow
• Lovecraft’s Monsters
• The Court of the Dragon
• The King in Yellow

New Worlds 224

Illustration by Mark Reeve.

New issues of New Worlds magazine have been rare things in recent years so the announcement last week of issue number 224 was a special moment:

New Worlds Vol. 66 No. 224, ed. Michael Moorcock (to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of his taking over editorship of the title), 09/’24, 978-0-9575764-6-9, a new full-colour A4 stapled outsized paperback/magazine, 72pp., illustrated by John Coulthart, Mal Dean, Herbert Sydney Foxwell, Allan Kausch, Mark Reeve, Julius Stafford-Baker; fiction/non-fiction anthology, contributors: John Clute, Coulthart, John Davey, Thomas M. Disch, Kausch, Roz Kaveney, Moorcock (a brand-new Cornelius story), Iain Sinclair, John Sladek, Pamela Zoline; first edition: £20.00 (for pre-ordered signed copies [while stocks last]).

N.B. This title is published on 30th September, 2024. Pre-ordered copies will be signed by Michael Moorcock and the magazine’s publisher.

See: https://jaydedesign.com/products_new.php

Copies in the U.S.A. will soon be available via www.ziesings.com @ $25 (for pre-ordered signed copies [while stocks last]).

If you’re in the mood for a spoilerish review you can see the entire issue leafed through and described here. In addition there’s also the New Worlds Annex which I’m hosting on these pages, a small repository of supplementary material.

There’s no need for me to recount the history of New Worlds, you can read about it in detail here. If you do know the history then you’ll know that the magazine under Michael Moorcock’s editorship acquired a considerable reputation in the late 1960s, upsetting politicians, the proprietors of WH Smiths, and the more conservative readers and writers of science fiction while publishing many important stories. In the 1970s New Worlds became a paperback series for a few years, managing ten numbers before resuming magazine format and increasingly sporadic publication.

Mike Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius story is a Holiday on the Buses scenario set in the usual Cornelius landscape of geo-political chaos. Mark Reeve and Allan Kausch also illustrated this one. I think my piece may be the first time I’ve ever had reason to draw a bus despite being a regular user of public transport. In order to create a contrast with the other illustrations I opted for something in the isometric manner of George Hardie. Not as severely styled as Hardie’s drawings often are but it’s heading in that direction.

The last Moorcock-edited number prior to the present one was in 1996, an issue which included a drawing of mine from the Reverbstorm comic series. The new issue sees Moorcock returning to the editor’s chair for what he insists will be the final time so I feel fortunate to be able to contribute more substantially to this issue than I did in 1996. As well as designing the magazine I’ve illustrated four of the stories, and also wrote a page about the hundredth anniversary of Surrealism which provides a loose theme for the issue as a whole. In a reversal of the usual state of affairs the writing was commissioned first, the design having been offered to other parties earlier this year. This didn’t work out, however, so Mike asked if I could take over, something I was more than happy to do. Rather than follow any pre-existing layouts I started with a blank slate, something I prefer in these situations. The erratic nature of the magazine schedule has meant that many of the recent issues have been standalone items even though each one bears an issue and volume number. The issues that followed the paperback series in the 1970s differed widely from one another, a trend that continued up to 1996; consequently I didn’t have to worry about retaining any attributes of the previous issues.

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