Wild Bore

I have just started working on a children's book with the speculative title "Wild Bore"

I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody

I love the immersive feeling of connecting with an artist and their world - when it happens it is the most special thing. I exist coated in their ideas, my eyes see the world alighting on details I wouldn't have found special before. I agree with Alan Moore that writing is a kind of magic, though I think there are a lot of trick magicians out there and very few real sorcerers.

Salinger's stories have so much wit and warmth - he makes it appear so easy. You never feel like you fully get to know his characters - when Buddy Glass tries to describe his dead brother, you get more of an impression of how much his brother meant to him than what his brother was really like. The back-story always feels bigger than the story. Salinger only lets us glimpse parts of it.

Just re-worked my Tomcat Murr book cover design...

Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you - Marsha Norman

(based on an illustrated book I made in a dream)

The Ladies' Paradise

Today I've been experimenting with watercolour.

This is a book cover design for The Ladies' Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) by Emilé Zola, a novel and documentation of the inner workings of a department store (based on the Bon Marché in Paris), detailing the experiences of the staff and the techniques used to overwhelm the senses, aimed at encouraging customers to spend. (The handrendered typography is based on Zola's own handwriting on the original manuscript.)

Seven Stories

This is a little book cover design I created for Krzhizhanovsky's Seven Stories. 

My favourite of the 7 stories contained in this collection is called Quadraturin, about a man who lives in a tiny room, in a building of tiny rooms (which, faithful to the regulations in Russia in the 1920s when the book was written, are regularly measured to check that they are the specified 9 metres by 9 metres). He buys a mysterious substance called Quadraturin from a salesman which, when applied to walls and floors and ceilings, causes them to grow. Unfortunately he forgets to dilute the Quadraturin, and becomes terrified someone will discover his endlessly growing room, which becomes ever darker and cave-like.

I love Krzhizhanovsky's writing, it reminds me of Kafka and Bruno Schultz, and maybe even a smidgen of Roald Dahl too. It crackles with imagination. And he kept writing it even though the censors prevented his work from being published in his time. Even now, I really think it deserves a wider audience.