Arthur Machen – Page 6 – { feuilleton }

Ibrahim Ineke’s The White People

A post last year about Arthur Machen’s masterpiece of weird fiction, The White People, ended with mention of a comic-strip adaptation by Ibrahim R. Ineke. At the time the strip was only available on Ineke’s website but this month the story is being published in a hardcover edition by Dutch comics imprint Sherpa. There’s a preview here (the dialogue is in English), and further details (in Dutch) about the publication here. Thanks to Ibrahim for the tip!

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The White People
• The Bowmen by Arthur Machen
• Rex Ingram’s The Magician
• The Great God Pan

La Bibliothèque de Babel

It was perhaps inevitable that this small collection of works of fantastic fiction was named after its director’s most famous creation, the Library of Babel. Jorge Luis Borges chose the titles, and also wrote introductions for each of the books. The series was published in France by Retz–Ricci, with 4000 numbered copies of each title appearing from 1977 to 1981.

Many of the selections will be familiar to Borges aficionados, others seem obscure as a result of the vagaries of translation: Jack London’s Les Morts Concentriques is The Minions of Midas, a story that Borges had earlier translated into Spanish as Las Muertas Concéntricas (The Concentric Deaths). The story of linked deaths apparently influenced the writing of Death and the Compass. I’ve never seen Borges discuss Arthur Machen at length so the inclusion of Machen in the selection is a welcome sight. In addition to The Shining Pyramid, the Machen volume also contained The Novel of the Black Seal and The Novel of the White Powder, two of the oft-anthologised sections of The Three Imposters.

The only detail that’s defeated me is the identity of the illustrator of the series. If anyone knows who was responsible then please leave a comment.

Update: the covers are credited to publisher/designer Franco Maria Ricci and Marcella Boneschi. Thanks to herr doktor bimler and Al Diniz.

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More trip texts

More psychedelia of a sort. Anthologist Michel Parry, who died last year, was a familiar name to British readers of fantasy, horror and science fiction for his themed collections: Beware of the Cat (1972; horror stories about cats), The Devil’s Children (1974; horror stories about children), The Hounds of Hell (1974; horror stories about dogs), Jack the Knife (1975; Jack the Ripper stories), The Supernatural Solution (1976; occult investigators), Sex in the 21st Century (1979), and so on.

Parry also compiled multi-volume anthologies throughout the 1970s, two of which have always stood out for me: the Mayflower Books of Black Magic Stories ran to six volumes presenting a wide range of occult fiction that included a number of obscure tales from Victorian and Edwardian writers; for Panther Books he compiled three collections of drug-related fantasy and SF stories that are just as varied, and may even be unique for the way they place authors as such as Lord Dunsany and Norman Spinrad together in the same volume. Both series are very much of their time—occult psychedelia!—and are worth seeking out, if you can find them. I emphasise the last point because it’s taken me a while to find a copy of Strange Ecstasies that wasn’t being offered for bizarrely inflated prices; my paperback habit has its limits… None of these anthologies have been reprinted so they’ll become increasingly scarce. For more invented drugs, there’s a good list at Wikipedia.

Cover art by Bob Haberfield.

Strange Ecstasies (1973)
The Plutonian Drug (1934) by Clark Ashton Smith
The Dream Pills (1920) by FH Davis
The White Powder (1895) by Arthur Machen
The New Accelerator (1901) by HG Wells
The Big Fix (1956) by Richard Wilson
The Secret Songs (1962) by Fritz Leiber
The Hounds of Tindalos (1929) by Frank Belknap Long
Subjectivity (1964) by Norman Spinrad
What to Do Until the Analyst Comes (1956) by Frederik Pohl
Pipe Dream (1972) by Chris Miller

Cover art by Bob Haberfield.

Dream Trips (1974)
The Hashish Man (1910) by Lord Dunsany
As Dreams Are Made On (1973) by Joseph F. Pumilia
The Adventure of the Pipe (1898) by Richard Marsh
Dream-Dust from Mars (1938) by Manly Wade Wellman
The Life Serum (1926) by Paul S. Powers
Morning After (1957) by Robert Sheckley
Under the Knife (1896) by HG Wells
The Good Trip (1970) by Ursula K. Le Guin
No Direction Home (1971) by Norman Spinrad
The Phantom Drug (1926) by AW Kapfer

Cover art by Brian Froud.

Spaced Out (1977)
The Deep Fix (1964) by Michael Moorcock
All the Weed in the World (1961) by Fritz Leiber
The Roger Bacon Formula (1929) by Fletcher Pratt
Smoke of the Snake (1934) by Carl Jacobi
Melodramine (1965) by Henry Slesar
My Head’s in a Different Place, Now (1972) by Grania Davis
Sky (1971) by RA Lafferty
All of Them Were Empty— (1972) by David Gerrold

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Trip texts
• Acid albums
• Acid covers
• Lyrical Substance Deliberated
• The Art of Tripping, a documentary by Storm Thorgerson
• Enter the Void
• In the Land of Retinal Delights
• Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers
• The art of LSD
• Hep cats

The Reflected Faun

Another one to add to the stock of fauns, satyrs and Pan figures that proliferate from the 1890s to the 1920s, Laurence Housman’s The Reflected Faun appeared in The Yellow Book in 1894. The magazine’s publisher, John Lane, also published Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan in the same year although an early version of Machen’s story had appeared a few years before. What’s notable about Housman’s drawing is the way he combines in a single image several distinct themes: Faunus/Pan, the reflected Narcissus, and all those tales of beguiling spirits lurking in water. The nature of the spirit in this picture is distinctly androgynous, a detail that wouldn’t have impressed those critics who considered The Yellow Book to be an unwholesome publication. The androgyny may be taken as deliberate: Housman was one of London’s “Uranian” artists, and a few years later joined George Cecil Ives’ Order of Chaeronea, a secret society for gay men and lesbians. In the light of this, the drawing might be interpreted as a symbol for a clandestine existence where true desires remain buried or submerged.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aubrey Beardsley’s Keynotes
• In the Key of Yellow
• Ads for The Yellow Book
• The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
• The Great God Pan
• Peake’s Pan

Aubrey Beardsley’s Keynotes

Promotional poster.

Keynotes was a series of 34 novels and short story collections published by John Lane from 1893. Aubrey Beardsley produced cover designs and embellishments for 22 of the titles in 1895 while he was working on The Yellow Book which John Lane was also publishing. Beardsley’s designs comprised a title frame with illustration or decoration which was blocked in gold on the cover and also used as a title page. For 15 of the titles he also created a series of key-shaped monograms for the authors, designs which were used on the spines and the backs of the books. Collections of Beardsley’s art often show one or two of these pieces but you seldom see them all, and even when the title frames are reproduced the type is often omitted.

Keynotes Series of Novels and Short Stories was a small book published in 1896 intended to gather all the Beardsley designs in one place and also promote the series in general. Two of the most celebrated works to receive the Beardsley treatment are those by Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light, and The Three Imposters. The decoration for the latter gives no indication of the horrors lurking inside that volume, while the faun on The Great God Pan is a world away from the amorphous nightmare in a story that caused considerable outrage at the time. According to Stanley Weintraub’s biography, the Keynotes series was very popular despite (or because of) the stir it caused, and helped keep Beardsley’s work visible when many of his other illustrations were out of circulation.

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