{ feuilleton }

Combinaisons Ornementales

After writing about Charles J Strong’s Book of Designs a couple of days ago, it seems pertinent to point the way to a far more essential Art Nouveau design book which can also be found at the Internet Archive. Combinaisons Ornementales was a collaboration between Maurice Verneuil, George Auriol and Alphonse Mucha published in 1901, and comprises 60 plates of beautifully elegant designs (“multipliable to infinity with the aid of a mirror”) which range from Mucha’s abstractions to Verneuil’s flower motifs. The examples shown here are all by Mucha; I borrowed one of the flourishes and the peacock feather for the Dodgem Logic cover design earlier this year.

For a quick look at all the plates, the NYPL Digital Gallery has scans. Mucha produced another design book the following year, Documents Decoratifs, although I’ve yet to see an edition of that online.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Charles J Strong’s Book of Designs
• Mucha’s Zodiac
• Dodgem Logic #4
• Peacocks

Weekend links 29

A Folies Bergère dancer, c. 1909.

• Six Novels in Woodcuts: The Library of America publishes a boxed set of Lynd Ward’s works: Gods’ Man, Madman’s Drum, Wild Pilgrimage, Prelude to a Million Years, Song Without Words and Vertigo.

• RIP ace graphic designer Raymond Hawkey. Related: Raymond Hawkey: An eye for detail, and Hawkey’s James Bond cover designs from the mid-60s.

• The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, an exhibition at Duke University, North Carolina, features work by 41 artists from around the world, from the 1960s to the present, using vinyl records as subject or medium.

The Île de la Cité, a steel engraving by Albert Decaris (1950).

• Fred Tomaselli will have a new exhibition of his work at the Brooklyn Museum next month.

• Socialist Monuments in Bulgaria photographed by Linda Ferrari.

• What would Howard think of the Mythos Art Dildo?

• Space is Process, a film about Olafur Eliasson.

• Thurston Moore’s Indie Books.

• Chris Colfer in a leather bar.

• Ephemeral New York.

• Chrome! Helios Creed’s YouTube channel.

Charles J Strong’s Book of Designs

Another gem from the cornucopia of scanned books at the Internet Archive, Charles J Strong’s Book of Designs was a style guide and motif resource for artists and amateur craftspeople tasked with the creation of advertising show cards or shop display signs. The book was first published by the Detroit School of Lettering in 1910, hence the heavy reliance on Art Nouveau flourishes which by this stage had degenerated from their Mucha-derived elegance into unbridled, and frequently undisciplined, rococo embellishments.

If a few of the designs lack Mucha’s care there are still some great examples here of generic Art Nouveau in its final days before Art Deco streamlined all those curves away. In the examples below a poster suggestion shows everyone’s favourite fin de sìecle gal, Salomé, while the final example shows one of Strong’s typeface designs. For anyone who likes the look of these pages but would prefer them in better quality, Dover Publications have a reprint scheduled for later this year.

Continue reading “Charles J Strong’s Book of Designs”

Salon Futura #1

It’s been a pleasure this week seeing my 1999 portrait of Cthulhu’s rotting domicile, R’lyeh, used as the cover image for Salon Futura, a new online magazine edited by Cheryl Morgan. Cheryl describes SF as “a new and hopefully somewhat different magazine devoted to the discussion of science fiction, fantasy and other forms of speculative literature.” Among the contents there’s a podcast interview with Gary K Wolfe, Nnedi Okorafor and Fábio Fernandes (the latter is a contributor to the steampunk book I’m currently designing for Tachyon); there are video interviews with writers Lauren Beukes and China Miéville, and the Guardian‘s Sam Jordison writes an appraisal of EL Doctorow’s 1994 novel The Waterworks (about New York City’s minatory Croton Reservoir) which stimulated my interest enough to make me want to search out the book. And speaking of minatory architecture, {feuilleton} approves of the presence of Taschen’s fat volume of Piranesi works spied on China Miéville’s bookshelf. China always has interesting things to say; go and see for yourself.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le horreur cosmique

The House of Orchids by George Sterling

Do all roads lead to the Internet Archive? Not really but I keep ending up there when I happen to discover an interesting old book and wonder whether they have a PDF of the volume in question. The volume for consideration today, The House of Orchids, is a 1911 collection of verse by George Sterling (1869–1926), an American but another of those writers whose poetry looked to Decadent London and Paris for its flavour, hence the Wildean title, and, it should be said, the cover design. I haven’t been able to find an artist credit for this; if anyone knows who was responsible, please leave a comment.

Many of the books at Archive.org are unremarkable library editions but this is a rare exception, being a gift to the University of California of writer Ambrose Bierce, Sterling’s idol and the person to whom he writes the above thanks and a dedication. Bierce praised Sterling’s work but must have passed the book on fairly soon after receiving it since he famously disappeared in Mexico two years later. Or maybe his library was passed to the university after his disappearance? Whatever the answer, this edition contains another curious feature in the form of a pasted-in newspaper clipping from 1926 concerning the death in mysterious circumstances of Sterling himself at San Francisco’s Bohemian Club. The general supposition is that he killed himself with a vial of cyanide he was in the habit of carrying around. One of Sterling’s young poetic protégés at the time The House of Orchids appeared was Clark Ashton Smith whose first volume of verse, The Star-Treader, and Other Poems, was published a year later. That book and another of Smith’s titles is also available at Archive.org, as I noted in June. Also there, and of particular {feuilleton} interest, is Sterling’s The Evanescent City, a paean to San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. (This site has scans of the text and photos.)

George-Sterling.org is a site devoted to the writer which includes many of his poems and other texts. Looking at his lengthy piece from 1907, A Wine of Wizardry, you can see what it was about his work that so appealed to Clark Ashton Smith and others.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Odes and Sonnets by Clark Ashton Smith
• Clark Ashton Smith book covers
• The Evanescent City