Lord Dunsany – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

The Great God Pan

Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros.

“The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He has been called the Father of all the Gods, but most of his children have been stillborn.”

So says a character in The Music on the Hill, one of the slightly more serious stories from Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis (1911). Saki’s Pan is a youthful spirit closer to a faun than the goatish creature of legend. But being a gay writer whose tales regularly feature naked young men (surprisingly so, given the time they were written) I’m sure Saki would have appreciated the Roman statue above. There’s nothing chaste about this Pan with his “token erect of thorny thigh” as Aleister Crowley put it in his lascivious 1929 Hymn to Pan, a poem which caused a scandal when read aloud at his funeral some years later. The Roman statue was for a long while an exhibit in the restricted collection of the Naples National Archaeological Museum where all the more scurrilous and priapic artefacts unearthed at Pompeii were kept safely away from women, children and the great unwashed. These are now on public display and include the notorious statue of a goat being penetrated by a satyr.

Continue reading “The Great God Pan”

December and Vernon Hill

Who was Vernon Hill? A good question since he’s another of those illustrators about whom detailed information is in short supply. He was born in Halifax, England, which makes him a Yorkshireman, and this page gives his birth date as 1887. A biographical note here states that:

Hill was primarily a wood-carver, most of whose illustrative work was done in the years 1910–12. His major achievements here were his designs for Ballads Weird and Wonderful and The New Inferno, both of which were collections of verse, the literary form most suitable for symbolic illustration. An important influence on him was Blake; it is seen in his often symmetrical compositions, the differences of scale of his figures, and their physique (which also show Hill’s feeling for sculpture).

Hill’s curious depiction of the year’s end comes from a set of equally curious lithograph illustrations for John Lane, The Arcadian Calendar (1910), produced in a style which resembles a hybrid of Sidney Sime and other post-Beardsley artists. This seems to have been atypical, unfortunately, subsequent book work shows more fully his Blake influence. The Demon Lover is one of the better illustrations from Ballads Weird and Wonderful (1912) which can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

The Demon Lover.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sidney Sime and Lord Dunsany
• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring

Dorothy Lathrop’s Three Mulla-mulgars

A Kipling-esque jungle tale by Walter de la Mare with Sidney Sime-esque illustrations by Dorothy Lathrop (1891–1980). The Three Mulla-mulgars was published in 1919 and is another book which can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Inevitably (and conveniently), Golden Age Comic Book Stories has two pages of Ms Lathrop’s work including a number of colour plates from the book.

• Bud Plant’s Dorothy Lathrop page

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sidney Sime and Lord Dunsany
• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring

Sidney Sime and Lord Dunsany

‘We would gallop through Africa’ from A Dreamer’s Tales.

More from the book scans at the Internet Archive. Lord Dunsany was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany and a writer of a number of fantasy tales beginning with The Gods of Pegana in 1905. His work is notable these days for having been a huge influence on the early stories of HP Lovecraft who once divided his literary output into his Poe pieces and his Dunsany pieces. Dunsany found an ideal illustrator in Sidney Sime who started out as a Beardsley pasticheur but developed his own slightly comical variant on the kind of exotica favoured by Edmund Dulac and Kay Nielsen.

Of the Dunsany/Sime books, Archive.org has The Sword of Welleran (1908), A Dreamer’s Tales (1910), The Book of Wonder (1912) and Tales of Wonder (1916). These stories are frequently too whimsical for my tastes—I’ve never been very keen on Lovecraft’s Dunsany pieces either—but they’re still worth a look for anyone interested in the lighter side of 20th century fantasy.

‘The City of Never’ from The Book of Wonder.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• HP Lovecraft’s favourite artists

The art of Bob Pepper

Forever Changes (1967) by Love.
Art by Bob Pepper, design by William S. Harvey.

Following yesterday’s post about Philip K Dick covers (and Erik Davis’s appraisal of the DAW cover), I decided to check out Bob Pepper’s work a bit more and it quickly became obvious I should have joined the dots with this particular artist years ago. Pepper’s work not only decorates one of the recognisable record sleeves of the late Sixties (above), he was working shortly afterwards as an illustrator on the celebrated series of fantasy reprints edited by Lin Carter for Ballantine books. Pepper’s connections with Elektra Records also saw him provide sleeve art for some of the eclectic releases on their Nonesuch label. What’s surprising to me now is the realisation that I’d been seeing his work for years in a variety of places and never noticed it was the same artist. Better late than never, I suppose.

Four more Dick covers for a series of six published in 1982 to coincide with the release of Blade Runner. As with the cover for A Scanner Darkly (in the earlier post) these paintings are all portraits.

A Voyage to Arcturus (1968) by David Lindsay.

It was the success of the publication of The Lord of the Rings in America which inspired Betty Ballantine to publish a line of fantasy classics in the late Sixties. The series began its run in 1969 and continued until 1974. Lin Carter was commissioned as editor and given free reign to choose any title he thought might be suitable with the result that many of the books in the series—obscurities such as Lud-in-the-mist by Hope Mirrlees—received their first paperback publication. Carter also reprinted personal favourites which frequently shifted from fantasy to outright horror, such as the titles from HP Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson. The range and scope of this line is what makes the series so notable today and the books have become highly-collectable as a result. Many artists were involved in producing the distinctive cover designs and Pepper’s illustrations were featured on the covers for Mervyn Peake, Lord Dunsany and James Branch Cabell, among others. Unfortunately the various pages devoted to these books aren’t very good at showing the paintings to their best advantage. For a long time Pepper’s cover for A Voyage to Arcturus was one of the few editions available that managed to show a scene from the book, rather than a generic sword-wielding barbarian.

The Wild Bull (1968) by Morton Subotnick.

Nonesuch Records was Elektra’s subsidiary classical music label which not only produced classical recordings but also recordings from around the world in their Explorer series, and a range of original works of contemporary electronic music. I’m not positive that the sleeve above is a Pepper painting but it certainly looks like it. This is another surprise since I’ve had Morton Subnotnick‘s album on a reissue CD for years (with different artwork). The George Crumb recording below is Pepper’s work and I’ve had the original vinyl of that one for several years. The similarity between that sleeve and the one for Love is striking.

Flesh (1969) by Philip José Farmer.

Golden Rain – Balinese Gamelan Music – Ketjak: The Ramayana Monkey Dance (1969) by Various Artists.
Art by Bob Pepper, design by William S. Harvey.

Ancient Voices of Children (1971) by George Crumb.
Art by Bob Pepper, design by Robert W. Zingmark.

Driftglass (1971) by Samuel R. Delany.

Debussy’s Greatest Hits (1972).

Concerto For Harpsichord And Five Instruments by Manuel De Falla (no date).

Ellison Wonderland (1974) by Harlan Ellison.

Fiestas of Peru: Music of the High Andes (1975) by Various Artists.
Art by Bob Pepper, design by Jo Ann Gruber.

Flower Dance: Japanese Folk Melodies (no date) by Kofu Kikusui, The Noday Family, Nakagawa & Oishi.
Art by Bob Pepper, direction by William S. Harvey, design by Elaine Gongora.

Pepper is retired now but produced artwork for Dark Tower, a fantasy boardgame, in 1981. The game still has its enthusiasts, and this site features a short interview with the artist.

Update: more about the Ballantine covers.

Update 2: a large scan of the George Crumb cover art.

Update 3: More album and book covers added.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton}
• Philip K Dick book covers
• Masonic fonts and the designer’s dark materials