Book By Its Cover wants Submissions

Book By Its Cover is a great little website that examines all kinds of gems from the world of printed matter and gives a lot of space to small-press things. It's looking for review copies.

More info here.

The Voice of the City

A recent illustration job for Paravion Press. This is a short story called The Voice of the City, by O. Henry. Like all Paravion Press publications, it comes in the form of a small, exquisitely designed chapbook, and it's part of a series of 3 books about New York City, the other 2 being works by Maxim Gorky and Walt Whitman. 

Paravion gave me free rein with this project, and I conceived the illustrations as a series of snapshots of ordinary life in the city. The images do not reference the text explicitly. Instead, they address the question which the story poses: What is the essence of the City? 

The story was written in the early 20th century, but you will notice that the clothing and objects in the images are contemporary. I made that jump because it underscores the universal quality of city life. Almost a hundered years later, New York is still New York.    

You can find The Voice of the City and other books by Paravion Press here.

Want!

I know it's a bit late, but I really want this for Christmas. It's another insanely beautiful book by Nobrow Press, featuring work by Yeji Yun, Andrew Rae, Luke Best, Katia Fouquet and a bunch of other people of whom I am deeply envious. So, you know, if you're really annoyed by all the money you've still got lying around after your Christmas shopping, and you'd like nothing more than to make a skint and wretched artist tremendously happy, send one of these my way. Just saying.   

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys: A Favourite

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This novel made a strong impression on me when I read it as a teenager. It works as a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, supplying the back story of one of the characters from that book, namely Mr Rochester's mad wife Bertha. Here, her name is Antoinette and she's a creole girl, displaced from her home in Jamaica to England. The story is defined by her memories of the lush, beautiful island of her childhood, but also a kind of feverishness, and I think that this wonderful cover captures that perfectly. Sadly, I haven't been able find out who the illustrator is, but this is one of my all-time favourite book covers.

Pure Gold

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The second Golden Hour book is out. For those who don't know, the Golden Hour is a monthly evening of poetry, prose, music, video and general niceness at the Forest Café. The book features some excellent work by people who have read at the Golden Hour and comes with a compilation cd of music. It's so perfectly sized and chunky you just want to hold it in your hand forever, and the cover was illustrated by you know who. The Golden Hour 2 costs £7.99. Support local talent and buy it from the Forest Shop, Blackwells in Edinburgh or Amazon UK (where it will be available soon).

The Codex Seraphinianus

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The Codex Seraphinianus is a book I have never held in my hands. It is very rare and very cultish. Luigi Seraphini, an italian arthitect and industrial designer, wrote and drew the book in the seventies. It has been republished a few times in small print runs and is very expensive, factors that have contributed to its obsurity. The main factor, though, is that it is a strange and mysterious book. The Codex appears to be an encyclopaedia of an invented world, originated from that world. Meticulously illustrated and written in an invented alphabet/language, it describes the flora, fauna, architecture, culture and other features of this absurd, imaginary world. It has a feel similar to the writings of Jorge Luís Borges and the Voynich Manuscript, which seems like it could have been a direct inspiration for Serafini. I first became aware of the book through an article in The Believer and subsequently downloaded the whole book as a pdf. It's not quite the same as having the physical book, of course. I'll buy it some day.

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Douglas R. Hofstadter writes "Some people with whom I have shared this book find it frightening or disturbing in some way. It seems to them to glorify entropy, chaos, and incomprehensibility." I think this is one of the reasons I like the Codex. Its elusiveness is as important as its beauty. It's a riddle that can't be solved.

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Conserving

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These are drawings I made while looking through a book called Conserving (by Daniel and Geo Fuchs). The book features photographs of animals and humans preserved in formaldehyde.

I worked with Aquacolour Monolith pens, which are really starting to grow on me. They are quite hard and don't blend very much unless you use water, which I usually don't, and don't erase well. But as I grow more and more used to them I'm starting to appreciate their qualities. The colours are great and when you work out how to combine them they work really well together. The trick is lay down subtle layers over and over, until they mesh.

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Ernst Haeckel: Kunstformen der Natur

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Haeckel was an embryologist, philosopher and a zealous advocate of evolutionary theory in Germany. He is said to have coined the term ecology. He is also famous for his stunningly beautiful illustrations. I would recommend finding Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms in Nature) in the library because the book itself is enourmous so these tiny digital images don't do it justice. Click on them to see larger versions.

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David Foster Wallace

I was very pleased to hear that, apparently, DFW had been writing something very long (obviously) at the time of his passing and that it is going to be published. Here's a link to an interesting article in the New Yorker, about DFW's struggle with his work and depression:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?yrail