John Coulthart's Blog, page 4

Weekend links 790

Set design by Vladimir Pleshakov for the Ballets Russes’ The Firebird (1923).

• The latest book from Swan River Press is A Mystery of Remnant and Other Absences, a collection of fictions by the late B. Catling. Copies include postcards with accompanying texts by Alan Moore and Catling’s friend and regular collaborator, Iain Sinclair.

• New music: The Loneliness Of The Hollow Earth Explorer Vol. 1 by Arrowounds; The Eraserhead: Music Inspired By The Film Of David Lynch by Various Artists.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Purple Cloud, by MP Shiel.

• A catalogue of lots at another After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn. etc.

• At Colossal: Laser-cut steel forms radiate ornate patterns in Anila Quayyum Agha’s immersive installations.

• Photographs by Man Ray and Max Dupain showing at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.

• Mix of the week: Isolatedmix 134 by Artefakt.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Anna Karina’s Day.

• Three Imposters

• Purple Haze (1967) by The Jimi Hendrix Experience | Pilots Of Purple Twilight (1981) by Tangerine Dream | Purple Rain (live, 1985) by Prince & The Revolution

Vincenzo Mazzi’s caprices

More Italian theatrical design. A few years ago I put together a collection of production sketches and paintings for scenes set inside vast prisons, a popular setting in opera and theatre during the Baroque and Romantic periods. Piranesi’s etching series, Carceri d’Invenzione, is the ultimate expression of the form, where the prints exist to show architectural invention and nothing more, but Piranesi wasn’t the first or last artist to concern himself with views like these.

Caprici di Scene Teatrali (1776) is a collection of fifteen printed plates by Vincenzo Mazzi showing suggestions for theatrical settings, several of which are prison settings. All of the scenes are distinctly Piranesian, especially the title plate which has the name of the artist and his series carved on stones inside the artwork. The prints seem to be the bulk of Mazzi’s surviving designs although a few additional examples turn up when you search around. There’s also at least one Mazzi portrait of an actor which suggests that most of the artist’s output confined itself to the theatre.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sanquirico’s theatrical settings
• Fantasie di architettura by Aldo Avati
• The other Carceri
• Fantaisies Architecturales by Henri Mayeux
• Temples for Future Religions by François Garas

Stanislaw Lem, 1996

The Polish writer has been in my thoughts for the past week, now that I’ve finally got round to reading Solaris while also having watched The Congress, Ari Folman’s adaptation of Lem’s The Futurological Congress. Reading Solaris was an interesting experience when the story is so familiar from the Tarkovsky adaptation, which I’ve watched numerous times, and the Soderbergh adaptation, which has risen in my estimation in recent years. The novel was fascinating for all the detail about the mysterious planet which the films omit, while also being somewhat old-fashioned considering it was published in 1961. Lem was apparently dismissive of Anglophone science fiction but by the 1950s the treatment of futuristic technology by British and American writers was increasingly sophisticated, even if the psychology and characterisation in their stories still lagged behind literature in general. Lem’s future timeline is like something out of the 1940s, where humanity can travel to distant star systems yet the spacecraft are the cigar-shaped rockets familiar from the covers of pulp magazines. In the station orbiting Solaris the trio of scientists have endless scientific discussions, the video screens are small and monochrome, and there’s even a mention of something being powered by valves.

Solaris may be Lem’s most popular novel but it doesn’t warrant much discussion in this Polish TV documentary after Lem has mentioned his exasperated arguments with Andrei Tarkovsky when the film was being planned. Tomasz Kaminski’s profile runs through Lem’s life mostly via its subject’s reminiscences, although there is occasional comment from Lem’s friends and colleagues in the Polish literary world. The film doesn’t offer a great deal of context either but it does provide a portrait of a prickly character who I’ve never seen speaking at length before. I found it useful to rewatch the Quay Brothers’ biographical film after this one, a shorter piece which fills in a few gaps in Lem’s history while also showing the degree to which his early life was dictated by the upheavals of the Nazi occupation and the Communist era.

There are currently two versions of Kaminski’s film at YouTube, only one of which has English subtitles, and very crude ones at that. Better subtitles may be found at Opensubs but to use those you’ll have to download the video first. 4k Video Downloader Plus is my tool of choice.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• 11 Preliminary Orbits Around Planet Lem by the Brothers Quay
• Maska: Stanislaw Lem and the Brothers Quay
• Ikarie XB 1
• Golem, 2012

Weekend links 789

Niemand (1990) by Micha Ullman.

• The Diary of a Nobody (1964) by Ken Russell, John McGrath, Weedon Grossmith & George Grossmith. A recent posting at Play For Forever, an archive of hard-to-find/unreissued British TV drama.

• New music: Paul St. Hilaire With The Producers by Paul St. Hilaire; Atoms In The Void by Ivan the Tolerable & Hawksmoor; The Cosmic Tones Research Trio by The Cosmic Tones Research Trio.

• At Public Domain Review: Julie Park explores the history of the camera obscura.

• At The Wire: Read an extract from Philosophy of Jazz by Daniel Martin Feige.

• At Unquiet Things: Jana Heidersdorf’s fairy tale subversions.

• At Colossal: Five decades of land art by Andy Goldsworthy.

• The Strange World of…Marissa Nadler.

• RIP Robert Wilson.

• Nobody (1968) by Larry Williams & Johnny Watson with Kaleidoscope | “There Is Nobody” (1976) by Brian Eno | Nobody (1978) by Ry Cooder

Tuning Instruments, a film by Jerzy Kucia

Back in February I posted a link to Jerzy Kucia’s first animated short, The Return. Since then I’ve been watching more Kucia films on Essential Polish Animation, a newly-released two-disc set that presents restored versions of 27 short films in high-definition. Tuning Instruments (2000) is a later addition to the Kucia oeuvre that isn’t on the Radiance collection. It’s also quite different to all the other films I’ve seen by this director, Kucia being one of those animators who tended to vary his stylistic and technical approaches from one film to the next.

The film does at least share a mood with some of Kucia’s later animations, a dream-like quality where the play of successive images is more important than any kind of structured narrative. Animation is an ideal medium for representing the shifting terrain of dreams yet the opportunity to do so remains under-explored. Quotes from Kucia in a biographical article at Culture.pl suggest that, for this director at least, the subjectivity of memory is more of a concern than the elusiveness of dreams. Tuning Instruments begins with a man doing exercises in a room. This sequence is followed by a motorcycle journey presented as a scrolling view of traffic and windows, after which the initial protagonist is forgotten in favour of a continually changing parallax landscape that leads us to a crow-filled wood in a misty countryside. I’ve no idea how Kucia and his assistants achieved many of their effects. The Culture.pl article says he mostly used drawings on paper yet the images are often overlaid or multiplied in a way that disguises their origin. Best to immerse yourself in the flow of imagery than wonder how it was achieved or what it all means

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Return, a film by Jercy Kucia

Lettering Lovecraft

A font design.

I’m still working on the new edition of my Lovecraft book, other projects permitting. The restoration gained a substantial boost last week when I finished re-lettering all the old comics pages, something I was initially reluctant to do given the amount of work involved. To date, there are 71 finished comics pages, 69 of which contain one or more lettered captions. This has never been a book where I’d want to use a typical US-style comics font, and with drawn pages you often want to avoid using book fonts which look too mechanical and precise when set among drawings. The thing to do—if I was going to do it at all—would be to design a font that would be a neater version of my hand-drawn lettering without looking so different that it changed the character of the pages. I’ve made fonts in the past but never taken the time to make one that would have to work this well.

There were two reasons for committing to all the effort. The first was that my lettering on the old pages had never been all that good to begin with. When I started work on The Haunter of the Dark in January 1986 the only comic strips I’d drawn had been jokey four-panel things while still at school. For the Lovecraft adaptations I was inventing my own method of comics adaptation from the ground up, paying little attention to prior examples beyond being vaguely inspired by Bryan Talbot’s first Luther Arkwright book, and the strips I enjoyed in Heavy Metal magazine. The Heavy Metal strips generally gave primacy to the art, with artwork that was more like illustration than production-line comic art. As with underground comics, most of the strips were also lettered by the artists themselves. The captions I drew on the second page of The Haunter of the Dark were pretty much invented on the spot, and since I tended to go along with these decisions once they’d been made, the first few pages established the look of all those that followed.

The weathered reference page from A Book of Lettering.

The lettering style I ended up with was an awkward amalgam of three different designs: my own lower-case letters, plus two sets of capitals taken from a page in A Book of Lettering (1939) by Reynolds Stone, one of my mother’s books from art school that she gave me when I was about 10 years old. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to use the Black Letter (or Gothic) capitals at the beginning of each new text box, with the uncials being used for any other capitals in the following sentences. By the time I’d finished the first story I was starting to think that using the Gothic caps was a bad idea, but rather than correct all the pages I stuck with the decision through The Call of Cthulhu and on into The Dunwich Horror. More of a problem for readers was that my lower-case letters were made with the same very thin pen I was using for most of the drawing, so they weren’t always easy to read. Once again, I stuck with the original decision.

All of which leads to the second reason for re-lettering the pages: if I was going to finish The Dunwich Horror then I’d have to letter any new pages in the old manner, hand-drawing boxes that matched the earlier pages. It was this factor that made me decide I’d much rather design a font based on my hand-drawn letters then apply this to all the pages in order to create a more satisfying and unified body of work.

The Bumper Book of Magic font.

If you’re used to working with vector shapes—something I do almost every day—dropping shapes you’ve designed into a font-making application is easy enough. The time-consuming part—and the thing that makes me avoid creating more fonts of my own—is applying all the kerning settings to every single character. Kerning is the name for the process that causes all the letters to sit neatly beside each other without any unsightly gaps. When I was working on The Bumper Book of Magic I created a font based on the book’s magical alphabet so I could type out words to use on some of the pages. I didn’t bother tuning the kerning for this design since it was only being used for headings, not passages of text; any uneven spaces were adjusted manually. My Lovecraft font isn’t as finely tuned as those produced by professional font designers but it does function as intended, and is much more readable than its hand-drawn equivalent.

Hand-drawn lettering from The Call of Cthulhu, 1987.

In digitising the letters I made a number of small adjustments. The upper-case letters are still rather uneven, being for the most part based on the uncial set from the lettering book. The lower-case letters have been tweaked a little so that the “t” isn’t so easily confused with the “e”, while all the loops on “g”, “j”, “p”, “q” and “y” now match each other. I’ve followed the original design by creating two sets of tails for these letters. The looped tails were an affectation that had a tendency to impinge on any letters running underneath which meant I had draw half loops to avoid having a tall letter or a capital collide with the loop above it. I’ve grown used to seeing the looped tails, and I wanted to keep them for the font design, so to evade collisions I made an extra set of letters with half tails which can be used at appropriate instances. In doing this I was pleased to see that some of the loops made ligature-style joins with the ascenders of letters like “h” or “k”. I can imagine typesetters frowning at the occasional overlaps of tails with ascenders but I don’t mind this so long as the readability of the sentence isn’t affected too much.

The same passage re-lettered (and slightly rewritten), 2025.

The results of all the effort have been hugely beneficial. All the pages are now much neater and more readable yet they don’t look substantially different from the older printed versions. I also weeded out a couple of unforgivable spelling errors which had been sitting uncorrected for far too long. And I was able to get rid of the ruled lines that I used to end the captions where the hand-drawn letters didn’t quite fill out the box. One advantage of lettering a pre-existing story is that you can add extra words to the captions, or even rewrite whole sentences. In a few instances I’ve been able add in more of the adjectives that were omitted to save space, so that some of the pages now have more of Lovecraft’s text than they had before.

This week I’m back at work on The Dunwich Horror which is now proceeding without my having to worry about the lettering. Further updates will follow.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Weekend links 788

The Witches’ Flight (1798) by Francisco Goya.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine reviews the latest book from Tartarus, a biography of T. Lobsang Rampa by R.B. Russell. You don’t hear much about Rampa today but, as Mark says, old copies of his books have for many years been common sights on the Spiritualism/Occult shelves of British bookshops. Rampa wasn’t a Tibetan monk as he claimed in his first book, The Third Eye, but a very non-Tibetan Englishman, Cyril Henry Hoskin, whose stories about his early years evolved following press investigations into a claim of being possessed by the spirit of a Tibetan doctor named Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. Hoskin maintained the Rampa persona for the rest of his life, writing many more books about the mystic East, as well as accounts of his contact with the planet Venus and his psychic connection with his Siamese cat. The Rampa books were very popular in the 1960s—my mother had three or four of them—despite continual accusations that their author was a fraud.

• New music: The Hadronic Seeress And Other Wyrd Tales by The Wyrding Module; Master Builder by Xeeland; Resurrection Of The Foghorns by Everyday Dust.

• The twelfth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi), and in English at Alan Moore World.

• Rivers of galaxies: Mark Neyrinck on the cosmic web and other metaphors that describe the largest structures in the Universe.

• “Curation becomes subservient to metrics.” Derek Walmsley on how Spotify distorts genre histories.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Erica Ward presents Tokyo as a living, breathing organism.

• At the BFI: Chloe Walker chooses 10 great films by one-time directors.

• At Unquiet Things: How Yuko Shimizu rewires ancient stories.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Jana Thork.

• RIP Ozzy Osbourne.

• Web Weaver (1974) by Hawkwind | The Web (1985) by Cabaret Voltaire | Web (1992) by Brian Eno

Bob Haberfield: The Man and His Art

Presenting a new book design, and a very substantial production. Bob Haberfield: The Man and His Art is a two-volume slipcased collection of the late Bob Haberfield’s drawings, paintings and illustrations, dating from his youth in Australia to his retirement in Wales. As a commercial artist, Haberfield is best known for the many cover paintings he produced in the 1970s for fantasy, horror and SF books, especially those for the Michael Moorcock novels published in the UK by Mayflower. He continued to work as a cover illustrator in the 1980s but his career encompassed album cover design during the 1960s in Australia, advertising and product illustration in Australia and Britain, and a great deal of personal work, all of which is covered here. The books were commissioned by Bob’s son, Ben Haberfield, who contributes a personal reminiscence and biographical note; the books also feature a discussion of Bob’s art by an old friend, Garry Kinnane, along with shorter pieces and remembrances by Michael Moorcock, Rodney Matthews, Peter Meerman, John Guy Collick, and John Davey.

As for the artwork, this covers an extraordinary range of styles and media. The first volume, The Man, is Haberfield’s personal catalogue of his career, covering his days at art school in the 1960s to his years in Wales. The second volume, His Art, is the commercial work: book covers, record and magazine covers, and a large amount of product illustration for advertising, supermarkets and food companies. Haberfield was a versatile artist with a flair for imitation, something which helped his later illustrations for product packaging (biscuits, chocolates, etc) where he was often him to create paintings or drawings in very different styles. So too with his book covers, many of which have gone unidentified for years because the publishers didn’t give Haberfield a credit, while the artwork wasn’t easily identifiable as being Haberfield’s own. I’m pleased that we’ve been able to confirm that several uncredited Panther paperbacks are Haberfields.

Genre illustrators tend to fall into two camps: the first group enjoy doing the kinds of drawing or painting that they’re requested to do for cover commissions, and are happy to do more of the same when left alone. The second group approach cover work as a job and nothing more; when left to their own devices you find them painting landscapes or portraits or whatever. Bob Haberfield was definitely in the second category. He landed in London in 1968 just as Mayflower Books was scaling up its publishing with a line of books that included UK paperback debuts of Michael Moorcock novels. Haberfield’s covers immediately stood out from Mayflower’s other books of the period, most of which were unimpressive photographic productions. Moorcock’s career took off shortly after; the Mayflower books were reprinted in larger quantities, and for a several years those books and Haberfield’s Buddhist-themed paintings were unavoidable in British bookshops. The Moorcock covers only occupy a small percentage of the pages in this collection but for many people they’ll be the main point of interest. It wasn’t possible to present all of the original paintings, many of them having been lost over the years or sold to unknown private collectors. But the collection does include a complete gallery of Haberfield’s Moorcock cover art, along with covers and original paintings for Panther (mostly horror titles), Penguin and others.

My design for the collection is fairly restrained, the main concern having been the presentation of hundreds of individual pieces of artwork; there are 608 pages altogether, containing around 800 individual paintings and drawings. The headlines are set in various weights of Busorama, a font launched in 1970 which is a common sight in design from that decade. Putting this lot together involved considerable effort, especially on the part of co-editor/publisher John Davey. It’s good to see it out at last.

The books are published by Jayde Design and are available here. RRP is £52 which is a lot but pretty much the standard for a two-volume slipcased set. More page samples follow below. There’s also an early review by The Outlaw Bookseller at YouTube.

Four Horsemen

Drie Apocalyptische Ruiters (c. 1943) by Willem Adolfs.

Willem Adolfs’ painting only shows three Horsemen of the Apocalypse but his picture is too good to be buried at the foot of this post. Adolfs was a Dutch artist whose work I hadn’t looked at before. His painting is a product of wartime, so the absence of the white horse (usually symbolising war) may perhaps be taken as referring to the conditions of its production. Adolfs spent the later war years in German concentration camps, dying in one near Hamburg in 1945.

Saint John sees the Four Horsemen (no date) by Jean Duvet.

After looking at Albrecht Dürer’s apocalyptic woodcuts last week I went searching for more depictions of the Four Horsemen. The quartet are the most familiar characters of the Book of Revelation, and such a useful symbol that their appearance has over the centuries become detached from their Biblical origins. War, Pestilence, Famine and Death embody perennial, universal fears, they don’t require a Christian framing to be acknowledged.

Apocalypse flamande (15th century).

There are many depictions of the Four Horsemen, especially from earlier centuries when war in particular tended to arrive on horseback. Recent depictions are less common. In 19th-century art Christian symbols had a cultural weight they no longer possess; paintings of Lucifer or the Whore of Babylon are staples of metal album covers but you’re unlikely to find them in art galleries.

Death on a Pale Horse (1796) by Benjamin West.

The Bruce Pennington paintings at the end of the post are unusual in this respect, being relatively recent and seriously intended despite being the work of an artist known mainly for his book covers. The paintings are from Eschatus, an album-sized volume published by Paper Tiger/Dragon’s World in 1976. The book is a series of pictures illustrating Pennington’s own translations of the prophecies of Nostradamus, a cycle of events which he depicts as apocalyptic science fiction. It’s a strange work, and not a very comprehensible one, but it does include the inevitable Horsemen on the cover painting, along with a portrait of Death (aka Ghost Rider) which appears in a detail on the back cover.

Vidi, quod aperuisset agnus… (1809) by Luigi Sabatelli.

The Riders of the Apocalypse (c. 1845) by Peter von Cornelius.

Opening of the First Seal by the Lamb (1852) by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld.

The Rider on the White Horse (c.1874–1883) by George Frederic Watts.

The Rider on the Red Horse (c.1882) by George Frederic Watts.

The Rider on the Black Horse (c.1878) by George Frederic Watts.

The Rider on the Pale Horse (c.1878) by George Frederic Watts.

Der Krieg (1896) by Arnold Böcklin.

Apocalyps (1964) by Ferdinand Vercnocke.

Eschatus cover painting (1976) by Bruce Pennington.

Ghost Rider (1973) by Bruce Pennington.

Ghost Rider (detail, 1973) by Bruce Pennington.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic and apocalyptic art of Bruce Pennington

Weekend links 787

Noonday Heat (1903) by Henry Scott Tuke.

• It may still be summer but the Halloween film reissues are already being announced. This year Radiance Films is presenting two features by Belgian director Harry Kümel: the lesbian vampire drama Daughters of Darkness (UHD+BD | BD), and Malpertuis, Kümel’s adaptation of the Jean Ray fantasy novel. This week I’ve been watching Polish animated films on Radiance’s just-released Essential Polish Animation.

• At Colossal: Dennis Lehtonen documents a pair of immense icebergs paying a visit to a small Greenland village.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: ShoreZone, nine short stories by dramatist David Rudkin.

The problem is that the extraterrestrials that xenolinguists claim to seek are often beings imagined to have technologies, minds or languages similar to ours. They are projections of ourselves. This anthropomorphism risks blinding us to truly alien communicators, who are radically unlike us. If there are linguistic beings on planets such as TOI-700 d or Kepler-186f, or elsewhere in our galaxy, their modes of communication may be utterly incomprehensible to us. How, then, can xenolinguistics face its deficit of imagination?

Perhaps by re-engaging its speculative origins. Through the mode of thought characteristic of science fiction, the science of alien language might yet learn to open itself to every conceivable degree of otherness, even the possibility of beings that share nothing with us but the cosmos.

Eli K P William on problems in xenolinguistics

• DJ Food’s latest foray into pop psychedelia is a look at the psych influence on the teen romance comics of the late 1960s: part 1 | part 2 | part 3.

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – July 2025 at Ambientblog, and Bleep Mix #305 by Adam Wiltzie.

• “The hot tar splashed everywhere.” Dale Berning Sawa on Derek Jarman’s Black Paintings.

• At Unquiet Things: Meet your friendly neighbourhood art book author & book seller.

• Winners of the 2025 Big Picture natural world photography competition.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty chooses 10 great heatwave films.

• The closest images ever taken of the Sun’s atmosphere.

• Kae Tempest’s favourite records.

• Heat (1983) by Soft Cell | Heatwave (1984) by The Blue Nile | Heatwave (1987) by Univers Zero