Walter Crane – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Steampunk Revolution

The “S” word again. One of the jobs from earlier this year is now available for purchase from publishers Tachyon and other outlets. Steampunk Revolution is the third in a series of steampunk story collections edited by Ann VanderMeer (Jeff VanderMeer was co-editor on the first two volumes). I designed the previous title, Steampunk Reloaded, and was working on these pages whilst also putting together the cover for Lavie Tidhar’s The Bookman Histories. Tidhar’s trilogy is a steampunk affair (and this collection features one of his Bookman stories) so there’s some slight overlap between the two designs, notably the use of a typographic “charm” I took from a Victorian printer’s catalogue. I’ve since seen that shape used elsewhere so it’s evidently more common than I thought. Bah.

The title page design above can be added to my ongoing obsession with the Exposition Universelle of 1900. Malissa Kent’s story, The Heart is the Matter, ends with a scene at the Exposition so I had an excuse to use an elaborate banner which includes an Exposition medal. (The same medal, incidentally, that you still see on the labels of Campbell’s Soup). The illustration below is adapted from one of Walter Crane’s Socialist drawings, and I feel bad now that we didn’t credit him for it. Sorry, Walter.

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Amy Sacker, book designer

Manders: A Tale of Paris (1899) by Elwyn Barron.

Amy Sacker (1872–1965) was an American book designer, illustrator and bookplate artist, one of a number of female designers and illustrators whose careers began in the last years of the 19th century. I’ve mentioned before how women struggled at this time for acceptance in the male-dominated spheres of painting and sculpture. Those who insisted on pursuing an artistic career were encouraged to concentrate their impulses in the decorative arts with the result that women are a lot more visible in the illustration and design of this period. (See this earlier post about Margaret Armstrong, and these pages at Princeton University Library about women printers, binders and book designers.)

The Kindred of the Wild (1902) by Charles G. D. Roberts.

The cover above is from the Amy Sacker website which features information about Ms Sacker’s bookbindings, illustrations and bookplate designs. A recent post here mentioned the Troutsdale Press collection of Amy Sacker bookplates from which the two examples below are taken. These often show people in Renaissance or medieval garb drawn in a style reminiscent of Walter Crane. More of them can be seen at the Internet Archive while the University of North Carolina archive has 120 examples of her cover designs.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Troutsdale Press bookplates
• Margaret Armstrong book designs

Troutsdale Press bookplates

Amy M Sacker.

The work of four bookplate artists printed by the Troutsdale Press, Boston, in 1903 and 1904 is contained in these small volumes at the Internet Archive. None of the artists featured are names I’d come across before. Amy M Sacker’s work is of note for being that of a woman given equal status among her male colleagues, and a nice clear-line style reminiscent of Walter Crane. The short text at the beginning of her volume runs through the history of the female contribution to bookplate art, drawing the conclusion (in the usual chauvinistic terms of the period) that women can indeed compete with men at this game.

• Amy M Sacker | Elisha Brown Bird | F Arthur Jacobson | Adrian J Lorio

The artist’s own bookplate by Elisha Brown Bird.

F Arthur Jacobson.

Adrian J Lorio.

• At the LA Times: What’s sticky and can be found in old books?

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bookplates from The Studio
• Yuri Yakovenko bookplates
• Tranquillo Marangoni bookplates
• Book-plates of To-day
• Louis Rhead bookplates
• Pratt Libraries Ex Libris Collection
• The Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest
• The art of Oleg Denysenko
• David Becket’s bookplates

Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration #7

Continuing the delve into back numbers of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, the German periodical of art and decoration. Volume 7 covers the period from October 1900 to March 1901 and features a set of ornamental capitals throughout this edition designed by Karl Lürtzing, part of a presentation of typefaces in the Art Nouveau style. The figures in Lürtzing’s alphabet all seem to be Biblical or mythological (as with David and Eve above) although some are easier to decipher than others. Volume 6 paid a visit to the Exposition Universelle in Paris and there’s a few more examples from that event here, along with further examinations of the best in German art and design. As usual, anyone wishing to see these samples in greater detail is advised to download the entire volume (which comprises over 300 pages) at the Internet Archive. There’ll be more DK&D next week.

Remarkable interiors by Richard Riemerschmid.

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The Tempest illustrated

“Such stuff as dreams are made on”: Heathcote Williams and Toyah Willcox.

DVD viewing earlier this week was Derek Jarman’s wonderful adaptation of The Tempest which he directed in 1979. This is my favourite of Jarman’s films, partly because the play is my favourite Shakespeare (along with its polar opposite, Macbeth) and also because it’s a film infused with an occult sensibility which comes directly from the director’s own interests, rather than being the usual film or theatre conventions of what magic entails. An example of this is the grimoire which Prospero (Heathcote Williams) is seen leafing through which Jarman reveals in his autobiography, Dancing Ledge, to be his own 17th-century edition of Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy. In his account of the filming he also describes his conception of Prospero as being based on Dr John Dee, the Elizabethan occultist who Shakespeare would certainly have known of, and may even have met since the pair both had business with Elizabeth I’s court. The most explicit reference to Dee comes in the shape of Prospero’s magical glass (above), based on Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica, and a prop I’d dearly love to own. Dee was also a character in Jarman’s Jubilee (1978), and his Angelic Conversations gave a title to Jarman’s later filming of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Seeing Jarman’s adaptation again had me thinking about the various representations of the characters. Ariel is generally depicted as a fairy type although he’s a lot more powerful than the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As for Caliban, like Grendel in Beowulf, he’s an all-purpose monster whose predominant attributes seem to be whatever Ariel isn’t: ugly, earthbound, stupid, treacherous, and so on. I’d be tempted to propose the island’s quartet as representing the four elements—Prospero: water; Miranda: fire; Caliban: earth; Ariel: air—but I’m sure that’s not an original idea given the amount of academic trawling through the Bard’s corpus. Rather than dig for symbolism, what follows is a few pictures found during another trawl of my own through the Internet Archive, where the books aren’t drowned but patiently await their rediscovery.

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