Sebastiane Opens October 1976: Sebastiane opened at the Gate cinema in Notting Hill last night after a day of record attendances and good reviews. At the opening Barney James, who…
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The book that made my head explode when I was 16. Calder & Boyars edition, 1968; design by John Sewell.
Years ago the idea of an opera based on The Ticket That Exploded would have been a…
A little something for Darwin Day, and a collection of illustrations I hadn’t seen before. The Cephalopoda of the Hawaiian Islands (1914) is another title in the splendid (and hug…
Labyrinth (Westminster) by Mark Wallinger.
A mandatory post, this one, seeing as how it combines two continual sources of interest: labyrinths and the London Underground trans…
First editions of Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
I like Peter Mendelsund’s book cover designs so it’s good to find the designer given the opportunity to provide new cov…
Older illustrated books often suffer at the hands of owners or a certain breed of iniquitous antique dealer who razor out their colour plates in order to frame them as prints. The In…
Grand entrance.
Every time I think I’ve said enough on this subject something else turns up. I’ve linked before to the Brooklyn Museum’s tinted photographs of the Paris Expositio…
Labirynt.
One of the links at the weekend was to this post about the favourite Polish posters of the Brothers Quay, a piece which included an example by designer and illustrator Jan…
Following some leads about American dancer Ted Shawn (1891–1972) turned up this series of photos from 1923 in which he adopts the Flandrin pose whilst enacting “The Death of Adoni…
La Jungle Nue (A Feast Unknown, 1974). Illustration de Alain Le Saux.
Chute libre means “free fall” in French, and here refers to an imprint of French publisher Champ Libre that fro…
Chris Marker’s feline obsession was oft-remarked: cats feature regularly in his films, and in later years he’d often send a picture of a cat to anyone requesting a portrait photo.…
More 19th-century futurism from French illustrator and author Albert Robida. Le Vingtième Siècle was published in 1883, and is a far more comical look at life in the 20th century t…
