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Steampunk overloaded!

Yes, it’s the “S” word again, and if there was any doubt that this has been the Year of Steampunk here at Coulthart Towers, look at these recent works. And this is by no means everything I’ve been doing in this area, there’ll be further announcements later on.

The covers for KW Jeter’s novels are a pair of reprintings from UK publisher Angry Robot whose books will shortly be available in the US and Canada. Jeter is now famous—infamous, perhaps—for having given the word “steampunk” to the world in the early 1980s. This was intended as a jest after he and a couple of other writers (including a favourite of mine, Tim Powers) had written a number of science fiction novels set in the 19th century; like many light-hearted neologisms, it gained a life of its own. Angry Robot are reissuing two of these early works as a result of the ongoing steampunk explosion.

Morlock Night (1979) is a pulpy affair which sees the Morlocks from HG Wells’ The Time Machine using the Time Traveller’s vehicle to return to Victorian London and wreak no end of havoc. Infernal Devices (1987) is a rather more substantial confection involving a great deal of clockwork mechanisms (for once the clock parts are justified!), automata, fish people, and a device capable of destroying the earth. I’ve been producing a lot of engraving collage à la Ernst and Sätty recently but the technique seemed especially appropriate here as a means of illustrating works which themselves are collages of Victorian motifs.

Meanwhile, over at Tachyon Publications, there’s this cover for another Victorian adventure, two in fact, from master beserker Joe R Lansdale. Flaming Zeppelins combines a pair of comic adventures, Zeppelins West (2001) and Flaming London (2006), which feature a host of notable figures including Mark Twain, Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill Cody…and a talking seal. Publication date is November 1st.

Then from Tachyon in mid-November there’ll be Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, a 430-page anthology edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer which includes fiction and non-fiction from William Gibson, Caitlín R Kiernan, Jeffrey Ford, Cherie Priest, and many others. Also a comic strip, copious illustrations and a very full-on interior design from yours truly of which I’ll only show you the above page for the time being. Yes, that’s a mechanical ostrich but if you want to know what it’s doing there you’ll have to read the book. More about this later. And more later about The Steampunk Bible to which I’m also a contributor, a glossy, full-colour guide to the entire sub-culture which will be published next year by Abrams. By the time that appears I’ll probably be sick of the sight of clockwork parts, dirigibles, florid typefaces and Victorian decoration; I’ll be needing a good dose of Helvetica and Josef Müller-Brockmann minimalism to calm down.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Skeleton clocks
• Vickers Airship Catalogue
• The Air Ship
• Dirigibles
• More Steampunk and the Crawling Chaos
• La route d’Armilia by Schuiten & Peeters
• The art of François Schuiten
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts
• The Airship Destroyer
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls

Der Eigene: Kultur und Homosexualität

Der Eigene, collected edition, 1906. Design credited to Adolf Brand.

The subtitle is from an article (see below); Der Eigene, the world’s first homosexual periodical was devoted to an ideal of “masculine culture” which looked to Ancient Greece for a model of same-sex relationships. Adolf Brand (“Editor, photographer, poet, polemicist, activist, anarchist, enfant terrible“) founded Der Eigene in Berlin 1896, and to give some idea of how advanced the Germans were in these matters, consider that not only was this a year after Oscar Wilde had been imprisoned in Britain but that Brand’s publication was only the first of several journals advocating gay rights at a time when homosexual acts were still illegal in Germany. The radicalism fell short of including women, unfortunately; like many Grecophile pioneers of the time, Brand’s world had no place for females. All this activity was part of a peculiar ferment in Germany around 1900 which saw the rise of many small groups devoted to naturism, Theosophy, occultism in general, and various pagan revivals. There were also plenty of fiercely nationalist factions, of course, and these took a dim view of Brand’s outspoken homo-anarchism. When the nationalists later turned into the Nazis they destroyed Germany’s nascent gay culture.

Morgendämmerung (Dawn) by Sascha Schneider, 1897. This drawing also appeared in Jugend magazine the same year.

The pictures here are from sets at Wikimedia Commons where the section devoted to the magazine has finally been amended with some higher-resolution copies. It’s a shame there isn’t more to see given that Der Eigene ran until 1932. I’ll be hoping for further works to come to light as the digitisation of rare publications gathers pace.

Der Eigene, November, 1920.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion
• Jugend Magazine revisited
• The art of Sascha Schneider, 1870–1927
• Hadrian and Greek love

Alhambra cyanotypes

The cyanotype process is a very old photographic printing technique and also the source of the word “blueprint”, after the process became common among builders and engineers for the printing of plans. The technique also has its enthusiasts today, some examples of which can be seen here. These views of the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, were taken by Carl Curman, a Swedish scientist and photographer, in 1878. The Swedish National Heritage Board at Flickr has two sets of Curman’s travel photography which include additional views of the Alhambra as well as other cyanotypes.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Constantinople, 1900
• Edinburgh, 1929
• Old Bunker Hill
• Inondations 1910
• Berenice Abbott
• Eugene de Salignac
• Luther Gerlach’s Los Angeles
• The temples of Angkor
• The Bradbury Building: Looking Backward from the Future
• Edward Steichen
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Atget’s Paris
• Downtown LA by Ansel Adams

Beardsley’s Rape of the Lock

This week’s reading has been Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a capricious novel which features in its 18th century scenes encounters with some of the great poets of the era, including Alexander Pope. A number of references are made to Pope’s satiric The Rape of the Lock (1717), one of his most notable works which received an equally notable set of illustrations in 1896 from Aubrey Beardsley. The pictures here are from a copy of the first edition published by Leonard Smithers which can be seen at the Internet Archive where the collection features a large number of books created by or written about the artist. Even though Beardsley’s illustrations are endlessly reprinted I do like to see how they were first presented to the world, how the pages were typeset and so on. One detail from this first edition is that we see the credit on the title page: “Embroidered with nine drawings by Aubrey Beardsley.” The cover design is often reproduced in its original black-and-white state which fails to convey the intended effect of those great slabs of gold, while the illustrations within are some of the finest and most detailed of the artist’s career. If the PDF doesn’t really do them justice there are better copies to be found, here and here, for example.

Leonard Smithers was notorious in Victorian London for his publishing of pornography but he tried to use the proceeds to occasionally produce works with a better reputation such as this. Beardsley had also been tarred as a pornographer, of course, but here he restrained himself in order to do justice to a book he admired. There is one possible exception in the cover design; I’m afraid I couldn’t find the reference but one of Beardsley’s critics asserts that the open scissors and fatal lock of hair shown in the mirror create a surreptitious image of the female pudenda. With many other artists this interpretation might be dismissed as fanciful but Aubrey filled his early drawings with phalluses and breast shapes, and his unfinished novel, the erotic fantasy Under the Hill, has a title referring to the mons pubis. No other artist of the time would be so daring even with a pornographer for a publisher; it was just this sort of impudence which infuriated his more staid contemporaries. Under the Hill is far more overt in its sexuality and its writing style owes something to Pope’s era which Aubrey adored. The posthumous edition of that book, containing other Beardsley ephemera, can be found here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Aubrey Beardsley archive
• The illustrators archive
• The book covers archive

Weekend links 30

Did someone say “woody”? Plenty more toy antics at TheOneCam.

• And yet more Haeckelisms: Praying in Haeckel’s Garden, recent works by artist Mary O’Malley.

• Seasons of the Peacock, the perennial showoff as depicted by a handful of Art Nouveau artists. A couple of examples there I hadn’t seen before.

• Dorian Cope presents On This Deity, “Commemorating culture heroes and excavating world events.”

• At long last, Fantagraphics will be publishing Ah Pook is Here, the comic strip collaboration between William Burroughs and artist Malcolm McNeill. Something to look forward to for next year. Related: Malcolm McNeill’s website.

• David Lynch Dark Splendor: “Der große Filmemacher David Lynch als Fotograf, Maler, Zeichner und Grafiker.”

• More on the forthcoming album from Brian Eno, Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins. With this degree of hype the end result is going to be a disappointment.

• Book design by Richard Hollis, including John Berger’s essential Ways of Seeing.

• A fistful of Vignellis: the work of Lella and Massimo Vignelli celebrated.

• Berni Wrightson’s Frankenstein at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• Jimi Hendrix, Philip José Farmer reader.

• Imagerie du Chemin de Fer.

• El UFO Cayó (2005) by Ry Cooder.