A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Cameron Stalheim’s artwork is entitled “and then I saw Colby on the Street and my fantasy died”. There’s also a mermaid among his remarkable sculptures but mermen are a less common sight, especially when genitally equipped as this one is. See further details at his website.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mermaids
Vanity.
A few choice pieces by a Russian illustrator and costume designer. Typically for me, the selection includes a profusion of wings and feathers. The siren-like Sirin appear in Russian legends, and are worthy of a post of their own.
Blue Bird (Sirin).
Fantasy.
Not all the bookplates here are German, the selection includes examples from Franz von Bayros and Walter Crane. The plates are from the 1907 proceedings of the Ex Libris Association of Berlin. I’d not seen anything by Mathilde Ade before but a quick search reveals her to have been a prolific bookplate illustrator. There’s more of her work here (and that blog is also worth a browse).
Artist: Phil May (1895).
The bookplates housed at the Library of Congress aren’t all available for online viewing which is a shame when their collection includes notable examples such as these. Three of the plates here were designed by the artists whose books they identified; two of the others are for writers—Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jack London—while the sixth one is for Charlie Chaplin. The artists’ plates look like continuations of the work of their creators which makes them less interesting than those of the writers and actor, all three of which say something about the way these men saw themselves reflected in their work: the pantheon of characters from Burroughs’ fiction; Chaplin’s poor boy conquering London; and Jack London’s lone wolf daring you to try to steal his book.
Artist: Frederic Remington (between 1880? and 1909).
Artist: Studley Burroughs (between 1914 and 1922).
Bernard Quaritch’s A Collection of Facsimiles from Examples of Historic or Artistic Book-binding (1889) contains a hundred colour examples like these. Decorative boards happen to be a significant feature of some forthcoming work of my own but you’ll have to wait a while before seeing the results.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Historic Design in Printing
• Hand bookbindings