Oscar Wilde – Page 32 – { feuilleton }

Jessie M King’s Grey City of the North

“This dark and steep alley took its name from Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees, Lord Advocate of Scotland, 1692–1713, whose mansion stood at the foot of the close. It was a fashionable quarter in the early 18th century, and here resided Andrew Crosby, the famous lawyer, the original of Scott’s ‘Andrew Pleydell,’ Lord Westhall, John Scougall, the painter of George Heriot, and many well-known people of the time.”

Another book scan from the Internet Archive, this time a title which plays to my fetish for Old Edinburgh. The illustration work of Jessie M King (1875–1949) was featured here in September with a delicate piece from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde. The Grey City of the North (1910) is quite a departure from her usual style, being a collection of monochrome views of buildings, streets and closes of the Old Town. Very nice lettering on all the plates which perhaps shows some influence from her colleague Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Advocates’ Close has particular significance for me since I copied a view of the alley for my adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark in 1986. Providence looks nothing at all like Edinburgh, of course, but I couldn’t find adequate reference at the time so used photographs of Scotland by Edwin Smith instead. You can see Smith’s photograph and my rendering of it below. Among the Internet Archive’s other Jessie King books there’s a follow-up to the Edinburgh volume, The City of the West; 24 drawings in photogravure of Old Glasgow.

Another view of the close from Edinburgh and The Lothians by Francis Watt; illustration by Walter Dexter (1912).

Advocates’ Close by Edwin Smith from Scotland (1955).

This book of photographs was an early Thames & Hudson title using their typically excellent photogravure reproduction. My copy was rescued from a waste bin near Manchester University and I’ve used it so much for reference over the years I’ve often wondered what I would have done without that chance encounter. You can see from my copy below (drawn with a 0.2mm Variant pen) how much detail I skimped and how much I embellished. I skimped rather more than I remember, as it happens. I think if I’d have drawn this a couple of years later I might have been more faithful to the original.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ephemeral architecture
• The Essex Street Water Gate

Dorian Gray revisited

Today’s book purchase was an edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray published in 1945 by the Unicorn Press, London. It’s rather battered and the spine is stained by some unknown brown fluid that may be blood (which would suit a sanguinary tale such as this) but which is most likely something less dramatic.

The cover is a cropped version of the design drawn by the wonderful Charles Ricketts (1866–1931) for the original Ward, Lock & Co edition of 1891. More about his work below. Ricketts designed and illustrated a number of Wilde’s books and was far closer to Wilde than Aubrey Beardsley, despite the latter’s permanent association with the writer via Salomé. Ricketts’ title design for Dorian Gray was originally lettered in full and the pattern beneath it extended further down the board. The reversed “y” is a unique touch, something I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else.

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“Weirdsley Daubery”: Beardsley and Punch

Britannia à la Beardsley by ET Reed (1895).

Pickings grow slim for the dedicated Beardsleyphile after you’ve bought a few books. Despite his prolific career, Aubrey B was dead at 25 and the better collections of his work, especially Brian Reade’s essential monograph, Beardsley (1967), tend to contain almost his entire corpus, juvenilia and all. So you find yourself seeking out the work of his imitators, his successors, and even the weak but not altogether unsuccessful “Nichols” fakes from the 1920s.

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The art of Jessie M King, 1875–1949

The Fisherman and His Soul : Her Feet were Naked
from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde, 1915.

A delicate piece of Orientalism illustrating Wilde’s book of fairy tales. Jessie Marion King’s work is a fascinating amalgam of the decorative post-Beardsley style exemplified by Harry Clarke and the Glasgow Style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Arts and Crafts movement. It’s unfortunate that her associations with Mackintosh sometimes overshadow her career as an illustrator despite her being as talented and productive as many of her male contemporaries.

The rest of the Wilde illustrations can be seen at Art Passions along with a number of other works.

• Jessie M King biography page

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Strange cargo: things found in books

The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects by Alexandra David-Neel & Lama Yongden, City Lights Books (1972).

One of the additional pleasures of buying old books besides finding something out-of-print (or, it has to be said, something cheap) occurs when those books still possess traces of their previous owners. A recent posting on The Other Andrew’s page concerned book inscriptions, something any book collector will be used to seeing. Less common are the objects which slip from the pages when you’ve returned home. There are several categories of these.

1: Bookmarks

I have a substantial collection of bookmarks proper, from embossed strips of leather to the more mundane pieces of card of the type that bookshops frequently give away. But I also make a habit of using odd inserts to mark a place as did the previous owners of these volumes. The City Lights book (above) came with a very fragile leaf inside it which may well be as old as the book. Another City Lights book I own, the Artaud Anthology from 1965, included a newspaper article about Artaud. Newspaper clipping inserts are discussed below.

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