Recovering Viriconium

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Detail from Assassination in the Night (c. 1600?) by Monsù Desiderio.

Yesterday’s post looked at some of the past cover designs for M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books. This post makes a few suggestions for how they might be presented in the future. Since these are mostly covers that I’d like to see they’re not necessarily ideal for the audience a publisher might be aiming at, cover design is usually a three-way process involving designer, author and publisher. In the end I’ve resisted the temptation to draft a range of original cover proposals—writing these posts has taken long enough—so almost everything here uses pre-existing art. If I was designing covers for all four Viriconium books, however, and the brief was to orient them towards a fantasy readership, the first thing I’d try would be a series of four imaginary Tarot designs. A peculiar pack of Tarot cards is a recurrent feature of the books so I’d create four emblematic cards that featured significant elements and characters from each. The characters wouldn’t be too well defined, they’d be stylised, maybe even silhouettes. Each card would feature a dominant presence: offhand these would be one of the geteit chemosit for The Pastel City, a locust for A Storm of Wings, the Barley Brothers for In Viriconium and a Mari Lwyd horse skull for Viriconium Nights. These presences together with the human characters would loom over a silhouette city at the foot of each card whose outlines would change appearance from book to book, evolving gradually from a fantastic outline of domes and towers to something that resembles a contemporary city. The colours and treatments would show a similar evolution from the bright and bold styles of the Pamela Colman Smith Tarot deck to something more photographic, collaged from elements closer to our world. Maybe.

That’s an idea for the four individual books. All the examples here use the convenience of the omnibus edition so a single image (or pair of images) has to somehow represent the entire series. To save time and effort I’ve taken the liberty of hijacking a couple of Penguin Books layouts. I hope Penguin doesn’t mind, and I should also apologise to Harrison’s UK publishers, Gollancz, for making one of their authors jump ship. The Viriconium omnibus is certainly good enough to be considered a modern classic. Penguin’s recent template for its Modern Classics series happens to be very easy to apply to a wide range of artwork.

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The Anti-Pope (1942) by Max Ernst.

Penguin has a long tradition of using pre-existing art on its covers, especially on those in its Penguin Classics series. You can almost make this into a parlour game: match your favourite novel with the best choice of painting. The tradition was extended to its science fiction titles in the early 1960s when the art of Max Ernst was featured several times along with the work of other Surrealists. Max Ernst is a favourite artist of mine so this is one I can’t resist. Many of Ernst’s decalcomania paintings of the 1940s would suit Viriconium but The Anti-Pope with its horse heads seems especially suitable.

Also on the Penguin sf covers was a picture by the mysterious “Monsù Desiderio” one of whose works can be seen at the top of this post. Desiderio was a 17th-century painter with a vague enough presence—works have been attributed to both François de Nomé and Didier Barra—and a line in gloomy architectural fantasias to make him an ideal Viriconium artist.

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Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s illustrated Tennyson

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Drawings from an edition of Alfred Tennyson’s Poems illustrated by British artist Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872–1945) which was published by George Bell & Sons in 1905. The book was part of a series of illustrated poetry collections that included several books featured here in previous posts: Poems by John Keats and Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley both illustrated by Robert Anning Bell, and The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe illustrated by William Heath Robinson. There was also an edition of Browning illustrated by Byam Shaw at whose art school Ms Fortescue-Brickdale was employed as a teacher. Her Tennyson drawings aren’t entirely to my taste, I’ve omitted the full-page works which are rather static pre-Raphaelite-derived things. Far better are these vignettes whose heavy outlines and sinuous curves resemble both Heath Robinson’s early illustrations and Pamela Coleman Smith‘s famous Tarot card designs. As usual the Internet Archive has the whole book and (should anyone require more Tennyson) Ms Fortescue-Brickdale’s take on that Victorian staple Idylls of the King.

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Valenti Angelo’s Salomé

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And still they come… Valenti Angelo (1897–1982) was an American printmaker, author of several books for children and the illustrator of an estimated 250 classic works of fiction including this 1945 edition of Wilde’s Salomé for Heritage Press. Angelo has an engagingly simple style in this and other works, reminding me of David Sheridan’s Tarot designs. The Internet Archive has a copy of his illustrated The Imitation of Christ with drawings reminscent of Eric Gill’s woodcuts.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrators archive
The Oscar Wilde archive
The Salomé archive

Dalí and the City

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left: Lady Godiva with Butterflies; right: Alice in Wonderland.

London already has a number of Salvador Dalí works on display but there’s even more to see this month with an exhibition at Moor House, London Wall, where a handful of minor pieces are on show until 30th June, 2011. Dalí and the City features the artist’s Alice in Wonderland sculpture as well as the print shown here, and also some Tarot card designs. The masculine form of Lady Godiva above can be taken as further confirmation of Dalí’s recurrent interest in gender confusion. The Independent has more examples from the show while this page has details of opening times.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Dalí’s Elephant
Dalí in Wonderland
Dirty Dalí
Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
Dalí and Film
Salvador Dalí’s apocalyptic happening
Dalí Atomicus
Impressions de la Haute Mongolie

Splendor Solis

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Venus: The Peacock’s Tail.

The Tarot-like illustrations to the Splendor Solis, a 16th-century alchemical manuscript, have fascinated me for years, ever since I saw them reproduced in the pages of Man, Myth & Magic. Despite their familiarity, the copies online are less than satisfactory, mostly poor scans from books with inconsistent colours. Given the amount of original alchemical documents being made available by the world’s libraries it’s only a matter of time until a decent set of reproductions turn up. Until then there’s a complete set of the plates here with details about the book and links to further information. As usual, if anyone finds better copies—preferably from a copy of the original text—please leave a comment.

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The Black Sun.

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Hermaphrodite with Egg.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae
Cabala, Speculum Artis Et Naturae In Alchymia
Digital alchemy