Lesebok

My sister found this book at a thrift store a year or two back, and it's been sitting on a shelf in her house ever since. I notice it every time I'm over, and have been meaning to post these images forever. I can't get enough of this drawing. Simple, direct, casual almost to the point of laziness. But virtuosic laziness. From an era when artists learned how to draw for real, to the point where they could do convincing, natural human forms in their sleep with just a few quick lines. Also perhaps of an era when illustrators of this sort may have been very aware of the rise of abstraction and questioning themselves a bit: note the weird Matisse-ish tree on the cover, and the odd, repeated stickfigure foxes in the forest. Anyway I don't know if Hans Bergerson is the artist, but whoever it is is my new hero (except for that weird flute playing fox... not sure what happened there).

Holly's next record

Early last year I did a record cover for my friend Holly's first record. Somehow I never got around to blogging it, but she's crowdfunding the money for her second record now, ending today (January 5th), in fact, so maybe now is as good a time as any. Aside from Holly being one of my favorite people on the planet, I have an interest in the fundraising, because I'm slated to do the cover of the second go round as well. Here's an image of the first record, a gatefold with foil stamping:

And the inside:

Part of the connection is that one of the songs on this first record, written before I ever met Holly, was inspired by a piece in my book The End.

The cover of the second record will be a continuation of the visual ideas as the first, so they'll be something of a set. Also it's a double LP.

Holly's already been in the studio a bunch. The new record is being recorded at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco, produced by John Vanderslice. Alan Sparhawk (of Low) is playing on it, as are a few other great people you can read about here. Some of my sketches and preparatory drawings for the design are also on offer as rewards in the campaign. So go help a girl out.

If you want a copy of the first record you might be able to get one from her, but I also just put a few copies up at my store site, here.

The Hawkline Monster

I just did a cover for El Monstruo de Hawkline, Blackie Books' fourth Richard Brautigan translation (I was especially happy with how the cover for In Watermelon Sugar came out). Here's the final, along with some sketches and an earlier version.

This ran in the Times yesterday...

in the letters section accompanying a couple pieces about the Spanish abdication.

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I just did the cover for the first publication of student writing from the Mid-continent Oceanographic Institute – the new 826 chapter here in the twin cities (formerly the Rock Star Supply co.).

Here's a sample. Order a copy and support the MOI. They're doing great work.

In Watermelon Sugar

When I began doing these Richard Brautigan covers I'd never read any of his work and had a vague idea that he was a pot smoking psychedelic hippy writer, and that I wasn't going to like his work very much. I was wrong. In Watermelon Sugar is kind of amazing. It is clearly connected to the sixties counterculture milieu Brautigan was connected to, and concerns itself in part with something that seems a bit like a commune in a late sixties, California kind of way. But that is incidental to the heart of the book. There is a wonderful sense of blissful naivete underlaid with a pervasive dread that almost gave me goosebumps. The story feels set outside time in a way, but also has oblique far future, post-apocalyptic tones. In that way it reminded me very much of CF's POWR MASTRS.

Here's a passage from the book that I drew from for one sketch. A second accepted sketch, and something like the final cover are below that.

A Lamb at False Dawn

pauline began talking in her sleep at false dawn from under
the watermelon covers. She told a little story about a lamb going
for a walk.
"The lamb sat down in the flowers," she said. "The lamb
was all right," and that was the end of the story.
Pauline often talks in her sleep. Last week she sang a little
song. I forget how it went.
I put my hand on her breast. She stirred in her sleep. I took
my hand off her breast and she was quiet again.
She felt very good in bed. There was a nice sleepy smell
coming from her body. Perhaps that is where the lamb sat down.

Troutfishing in America

I drew Richard Brautigan for some Spaniards, too.

The Great Gatsby

This summer I was asked to do a cover for the Great Gatsby for Penguin U.K. The idea was to reference old playbills from the twenties or thirties. I started out with very detailed portraits of 'the players' drawn from images I found of film stars of the time (Daisy here is Bessie Love, Tom is William Haines, most of the others are composites), the idea being that the drawings would recall vignetted, engraved portraits, also typical of the time.



Ultimately the piece called for something more graphic and simplified. following are a few variations, the last being the final accepted piece.

Dennis Hopper

Fridays in July (there are two left as I write this) Cinefamily in Los Angeles is doing a little Dennis Hopper festival. Sammy asked me to do a drawing of everyones favorite cracked nitrous huffing film icon and auteur for the cover of the program. They are showing truly impossible to find rarities. Stuff that, even in this age where everything can by found in the world of cyber, some of these films can't. It's worth a look.

Public Service Announcement

I heard earlier this year that a cover I did for a new edition of The Odyssey from W.W. Norton won a blue ribbon at the New York Book Fair (scroll down to "Quality Paperbacks") put on by the Bookbinder's Guild of New York last March. I think I'm supposed to notify the public about things like this. And so, voila.


For those readers who don't know Homer's odd little tale, the central image is of Odysseus under the gaze of Poseidon, who persecutes him for killing the god's son, the Cyclops (the monster in the upper right) after trying unsuccessfully to steal his sheep (under the lotus blossom, upper left). We've also got a cross dressing goddess of wisdom who likes to give Odysseus advice he can't really understand (Athena, bottom), Odysseus wife Penelope (top), one of her suitors (drinking our hero's wine in his absence), Hermes' feet, Odysseus dog, and one of his crew of impulsive sailors who's been turned into a cow by a witch who Odysseus promptly shacks up with for a few years immediately afterward. On the back of the book there is also a very small view of Ithaca. But you'll have to go find the book yourself for that one.

(as usual, click for a much nicer view)

The Slide

Kyle Beachy's debut novel The Slide comes out this week. You should get it. I did the cover, but that's not why--it's also a really good read. Beachy does a clever and relentless inversion of a traditional middle-American coming of age tale...complete with ghosts, baseball, statutory rape and a dissolving marriage. He'll be reading from it at the Book Cellar in Chicago on Thursday, January 29th.

King Penguin part three

Below are images from Spiders (1947) with images "made and printed by" John Swain and Sons; and British Shells (1943) with "colour plates made and printed by The Baynard Press".

The King Penguin part 2

Below are images from British Reptiles and Amphibia (1949) illustrated by Paxton Chadwick and British Military Uniforms (1948) with color plates by John Swain.