NEWS

A very short newsletter in lieu of a real one, to wish everyone a satisfying end to 2016 and the very best for 2017. I hope projects will come to fruition, and will be quickly forgotten in the prospect of new and even more exciting ones, that family and loved ones...

Just what is it about the making of pictures? Endless pondering on the nature of image-making, of the desire and the need to make images, has left me no closer to that mirage despite all the assiduous musing. From where do images come – for they must have an origin –...

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our...

G. K. Chesterton is one of the most underrated modern authors of fantastical fiction. So, imagine my delight when a copy of “THE VENTURE: An Annual of Art and Literature” from 1903 (edited by none other than the unlikely duo of Laurence Housman[2] and W. Somerset...

Warwick Goble (22 November 1862 – 22 January 1943) is undeniably one of the foremost figures of the Golden Age of illustration. Fairy tale, myth and legend, the grand classics of children’s literature, he seems to have turned his hand to most of them, from MacKenzie’s...

The Dragons of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth   "I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at...

It seems like ages ago that I wrote a short text for the introduction of The Hobbit Chronicles: The Battle of the Five Armies, and then lost track of the finished version.[1] Having run short of time recently to create original newsletters, I hope you'll forgive me...

The Deadly Draconic Gaze: A closer look at Gorgons, Cockatrices & Basilisks "Man is a mis-shapen monster with his feet set for-ward and his face set back. He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic so long as he is thinking about the past… to-morrow is the...

I HAVE desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have...

A legend is a fairy tale told to men when men were sane.  - G. K. Chesterton When I was small, I owned a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, illustrated by the author. I recall an oddly tense relationship with that book, due in large part to the illustrations,...

I had no idea. Like most people, I only thought I knew the Wonderful Wizard of Oz: the book, the musicals, the films, both old and recent... I had no idea that L. Frank Baum, the creator of Oz, had trod the Yellow Brick Road so many times, or that he had dutifully...

But don’t be alarmed, it already happened in 1894. The other day, I stumbled across a most extraordinary article in the August 1894 issue of Scribner’s Magazine, entitled The End of Books, by a certain Octave Uzanne, with illustrations by the prolific futurist...