The Yellow Book – { feuilleton }

The Eerie Book

Work-wise, I’m still preoccupied with Edgar Allan Poe so I’ve been delving into the Internet Archive’s stock of scanned books more than usual. I’m not looking now for earlier Poe illustrations but a search last month turned up this collection of horror stories edited by Margaret Armour, and illustrated by William Brown Macdougall. Armour and Macdougall were married, and collaborated on several illustrated books; they also knew Aubrey Beardsley—Macdougall contributed to both The Yellow Book and The Savoy—so many of the illustrations in this volume are in the post-Beardsley manner. As Beardsleyesque drawings go they’re not as successful as, say, those of Will Bradley; some of Macdougall’s faces are rather dopey, and the cross-hatching doesn’t always work with this style of black-and-white art, as Beardsley himself discovered. But Macdougall’s drawing for The Masque of the Red Death is a better illustration than Beardsley’s own, horror not being one of Aubrey’s strengths. The Eerie Book may be browsed in full here.

The Masque of the Red Death.

The Iron Coffin.

The Mother and the Dead Child.

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Form and Austin Osman Spare

The University of Heidelberg‘s scanning programme continues to be a source of delight for those of us without professional or financial access to rare book collections. Having recently made the entire run of Der Ochideengarten available, they’ve added scans of another journal that was on my list of magazines I’d been hoping would eventually turn up online. Form was the first of two short-lived publications edited by Austin Osman Spare from 1916 to 1924, the second being The Golden Hind. Spare and co-editor “Francis Marsden” (Frederick Carter) published two issues of Form before Spare was conscripted in 1917. After the war, publication resumed with two further issues. Spare aficionados have long been familiar with the drawings in these publications, many of which have been reprinted over and over in collections of Spare’s art but often with no indication of their original context.

Seeing the drawings in situ like this not only restores the context but also sets them beside the accompanying work by Spare’s fellow writers and artists. Some of the other contributors need no introduction—WB Yeats, Robert Graves—while others have been neglected or even forgotten. Most descriptions of Form mention its following in the lineage of The Yellow Book, publisher John Lane having been responsible for both publications. But looking through the first two issues I’d say the model is as much The Savoy, the magazine that Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Symons put together after The Yellow Book kicked out Beardsley in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trial. Yeats was a contributor to The Savoy, and two other artists present in Form—Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon—were friends and publishers of Wilde.

The samples here are mostly Spare’s work, and only a small selection at that. Enthusiasts are encouraged to download the PDFs for themselves. I had seen one of these issues before (Alan Moore has an enviable collection of Spare publications) but the rest were magazines I’d been waiting decades to see in full. I’m hoping now that the excellent staff at Heidelberg may have copies of The Golden Hind waiting for similar treatment.

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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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Lucian’s True History

Lucian is Lucian of Samosata whose True History (also known as A True Story) is often regarded as one of the earliest works of science fiction. The book is a satirical work, but unlike many earthbound satires this one concerns a journey into outer space, encounters with the inhabitants of various planets, and descriptions of interplanetary war.

These illustrations are from the 1894 edition which included contributions by Aubrey Beardsley that were the artist’s earliest drawings after the enormous labour of the Morte d’Arthur. Beardsley was eager to illustrate the book which he found more stimulating than the Mallory but when commissions arrived for Wilde’s Salomé and The Yellow Book he found himself overworked. (The publishers also rejected two of the more grotesque drawings.) William Strang and JB Clark filled out the rest of the book. The Beardsley illustrations are familiar from the larger collections but I’d not seen the Strang and Clark drawings until now. Content-wise this was the strangest book that Aubrey worked on, and I can’t help but wonder how he might have illustrated the rest of it if he’d had the time.

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