BibliOdyssey – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 104

Prettiest Star (2004) by Timothy Cummings.

• I Want Your Love, a feature film directed by Travis Mathews catches my attention for having been described as “the gay Shortbus” even though (as the director notes) Shortbus was pretty gay to begin with.

• I’ve always found Hans Christian Andersen’s story of The Tinderbox—a tale of spectral dogs with enormous eyes—to be rather weird. But these illustrations by Heinrich Strub for a 1956 edition beat everything.

• “From an early age, however, I became in secret the slave of certain appetites.” The line that Robert Louis Stevenson deleted from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

• Scientific American: Homophobes might be hidden homosexuals. Not exactly fresh news but always worth bearing in mind when someone starts ranting about those evil gays.

• Minimal Wave: The 80s synth-pop underground. The Minimal Wave label releases a vinyl compilation by Hard Corps this month.

• “Blame the Victorians for making menswear boring.” Alex Jung on the endless tyranny of the suit-and-tie combination.

• Women, Vaginas and Blood: Breaking menstrual taboos with artist Sarah Maple.

• London’s lost rivers (again): the hidden history of the city’s buried waterways.

• Vincenzo Pacelli says the Knights of Malta murdered Caravaggio.

• Street style 1906: Edward Linley Sambourne’s fashion blog.

• Architectural Stationery Vignettes at BibliOdyssey.

• Hans Bellmer & Unica Zürn at Ubu Gallery, NYC.

• Pam Grossman admits to being a “candle hooch”.

• Dirty (1986) by Hard Corps | Lost Rivers Of London (1996) by Coil | The Tinderbox (2009) by Patrick Wolf.

Jean de Bosschère’s Folk Tales of Flanders

The illustrations of Belgian artist Jean de Bosschère (1878–1953) aren’t as easy to find as those of his British and American contemporaries so it’s a shame there isn’t more of his idiosyncratic work at the Internet Archive. Folk Tales of Flanders is there, however, an edition from 1918 featuring a number of colour plates and many black-and-white illustrations. For once I prefer the paintings over the line drawings, de Bosschère’s colour work perhaps owes something to Edmund Dulac’s style but it’s a lot more eccentric, especially here where he’s required to depict the activities of a host of anthropomorphic animals. The eccentricities extended to the artist’s life and the books he wrote, one of which is an autobiography entitled Satan l’Obscure (1933). A lighter work, Weird Islands (1921), was featured at BibliOdyssey a couple of years ago.

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Alfred Rethel’s Totentanz

Der Tod als Erwürger (1851) by Alfred Rethel.

The Danse Macabre seems to be a theme of the month given recent postings at BibliOdyssey, Wurzletod and 50 Watts. In addition to posting examples, BibliOdyssey points the way to some original sources at Düsseldorf, four of them books that feature engravings by German artist Alfred Rethel (1816–1859). (All four books appear to be the same works, unfortunately.) The pictures here are later Rethel pieces that are a lot more detailed, and may well be the last things the artist had published. A note at the British Museum (where a larger copy of the first picture can be seen) states that Rethel was “Insane since 1853”.

Der Tod als Freund (1851) by Alfred Rethel.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Jacopo Ligozzi, 1547–1627
• Massachusetts memento mori
• Skull cameras
• Walmor Corrêa’s Memento Mori
• The skull beneath the skin
• Vanitas paintings
• Very Hungry God
• History of the skull as symbol

Weekend links 80

Niels Klim’s descent to the planet Nazar from the 1845 edition of Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (Niels Klim’s Underground Travels) (1741) by Ludvig Holberg.

BibliOdyssey posts illustrations from different editions of Ludvig Holberg’s satirical fantasy, appends the usual informative links and draws our attention Stories of a Hollow Earth at The Public Domain Review. I’d not come across the latter site before but it’s now bookmarked.

• While the economy of Europe continues to circle the toilet bowl it’s good to know that our Prime Minister is focusing on the important issues such as…limiting access to internet pornography. “Look at the implementation, and no matter where you stand on porn, I think you’ll see this plan is going to cause a lot of problems on its way to the eventual fail bin,” says Violet Blue. I was wondering how the four targeted ISPs would feel about a filtering plan that would drive many new customers elsewhere. The Register reports their response which comes down to offering guidelines rather than attempting the difficult and contentious task of filtering millions of websites.

• Related: Won’t you fuck off, Reg Bailey, in which the report by the small Christian pressure group that started all the fuss is eviscerated. | Elsewhere: Porn is good for society says Anna Arrowsmith, while Tristan Taormino asserts that “writing and publishing erotica, especially for minorities, is a political act.” Then there’s Pornsaints, “an artistic approach to porn, a pornographic approach to art, a pornartistic approach to religion.”

• In the music world: Richard H Kirk and Peter Care discuss Cabaret Voltaire and Johnny YesNo, Roy Harper talks to Alexis Petridis, and soundtrack composer Cliff Martinez is interviewed (and pictured playing a Cristal).

• Witch’s Cradle at Strange Flowers (Maya Deren, Marcel Duchamp and Peggy Guggenheim), The Ghosts of Senate House, London, and Aleister Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema as it is today.

• RIP Frank Kameny, co-founder of the Mattachine Society, and a tireless gay rights advocate from the early 1960s on.

• Bruce Weber photographs some of the dancers from Matthew Bourne’s Dance Company.

• Terry Gilliam says “I used to think I could will things into existence. Not any more.”

• Charts at Business Insider: What the Wall Street protesters are so angry about.

• Five From…: assorted wit and wisdom in the Tumblr labyrinth.

• Glass art by Jasmine Targett.

• Ballard Geocoded.

• Porno Base (1982) by 23 Skidoo | Kylie Minogue (2003) by Satanicpornocultshop | Tantric Porno (live) (2009) by Bardo Pond.

Compass roses

Compass rose by John Speed (1610).

Be still, my beating heart… Every so often this graphic designer has been known to complain that there isn’t a decent resource for those cartographic details known as compass roses. Well today I hit the motherlode with the discovery of Alte Schiffskompasse und Kompassteile im Besitz Hamburger Staatsanstalten (1910) by Albert Schück at the Internet Archive. Schück’s book is a small study of the evolution of the compass card from crude diagram to the elaborate creations seen here, bedizened with astrological figures or divided into degrees. The plates are exactly the kind of thing I’ve been after for years, not that I need them for any particular purpose but—given that I fetishise these things—it’s good to have them to hand.

Part of the obsession can be traced to the compass rose on John Speed’s map of Great Britain and Ireland (above). My teenage bedroom walls included among their pictures a facsimile of Speed’s map printed on some peculiar plasticised paper which (as I recall) was supposed to make it look an antique print. When drawing maps of my own I’d usually copy Speed’s compass rose, and familiarity with the device meant that I started searching them out whenever I saw another old map. Also on the bedroom wall was Pauline Baynes’ map of Middle Earth which includes a compass rose of its own.

BibliOdyssey posted a nice selection of Speed maps recently, all of them hand-coloured (my reproduction was black-and-white). Speed’s compass rose for the Isle of Man makes the island appear to be the centre of the world. Also at the Internet Archive is a similar study to the Schück, The Rose of the Winds: The origin and development of the Compass-Card (1913) by Silvanus P Thompson. This is more useful if your interest is in the actual history of the cards since the diagrams are a lot less extravagant. Among other things Thompson refers to Schück’s volume in a note about the origin of the fleur-de-lys figure as a compass fixture. “Rose of the Winds” refers to the very earliest compass devices in which directions were marked not with North, South, East and West but with whatever the local names were for the winds at sea.

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