Raymond the Librettist

Holy double-crossing dames! Writer Kim Cooper recently discovered that famed noir novelist Raymond Chandler wrote a libretto for a proposed operetta "The Princess and the Pedlar."

Read The Guardian's article about the discovery here. And if you want to see this work staged, there's a website detailing the efforts to try to make that happen.

Song and dance man?

(We Can't) Stop Talking About Monsters (Already!)

Listen buster, a good article about the less popular creeps from horror writing is not going to escape our attention. Neither will it escape yours. Here's a little taste:

"Next time you need to name check a novel about a prostitute impregnated with the sperm of a hanged man by a mad geneticist so that she gives birth to a vengeful nymphomaniac written by a homosexual Nazi, you’ll be glad we had this chat."

JW McCormack wrote the piece and it taught us several things about monsters we thought we knew, and clued us in to some reading material we are now obligated to seek out.

Read "31 Fairly Obscure Literary Monsters" and chances are we'll be fighting you for the last copy of Ambrose Bierce's The Damned Thing at the library.

Now, look at this cat:

Is There Any Other Kind?

Reviews for this paperback from 1971 range from straightforward to snarky. Well, pretty much either one or the other. And those are just the reviews from a bunch of modern resources.

Who knows how this book was received during it's original time as a new release on the shelf? The point is, copies are for sale and if you're terribly interested in rising to the challenge of the title, don't let us stand in your way. The authors, we assume, knew what they were talking about. 

As for the rest of us, there's so much to study here:

For real, just put the title of this book into the search engine of your choice and find out what's inside. Then tell us.

Cliff's Notes For Dummies, Ya Dummy!

Forgive us for just discovering Better Book Titles, the Tumblr that sums up classic literature by re-titling the books with, well, take a look at the Halloween set and you'll get the idea.

[Hat tip to Hark A Vagrant's Tumblr.]

Howard and Ray

The American writer of weird fiction, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, would have been 124 years old on Aug 20, if here were still alive. And who knows, maybe he is? The mythology he created has become so deeply ingrained in the fantasy and horror cannon, it might as well be scripture -- or, y'know, the truth.

Look at this great cover for one of his more terrifying novellas The Dunwich Horror:

The water color inks and psychedelic slant of the artwork reflects the story quite well, with beings that defy Earthly biology and cosmic magic that's only hinted at in the dark bottom portion of the cover. Read some Lovecraft, will ya?

A nice complement to this news is that Aug 22 is Ray Bradbury's birthday. Unlike Lovecraft's bleak, sometimes depressing horror, Bradbury had an inhuman gift for balancing moments of terror with genuine sweetness.

His work stands acts like a boilerplate for many screenwriters and filmmakers who have attempted (and a few succeeded, though never quite like Bradbury) at tapping into the mind of gentle, introspective protagonists thrust into unbelievable situations.

Check out this vintage cover art for Bradbury's novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. It's loaded with intrigue and hints of unforseen danger:

If neither of these makes you want to read even one short story from either of these authors, well buddy, you're on the wrong end of the internets.

Let's close this catch-up post with a bit of music appropriate to the topic. Windand formed in 2009, a five-piece playing stoner/doom metal with a real gift for atmosphere and bluster. The quintet wields dynamics for more than just sonic impact, with a gift for shading and mood that falls from the grasp of many bands working in those genres.

Their latest album Soma, was released nearly a year ago. And now there's a video for the song "Orchard." The visuals work well with the song, and demonstrate a great re-purposing of (what we assume is) public domain footage with newly photographed sequences. Let's get eerie:

WINDHAND - "Orchard" (Official Video) from Relapse Records on Vimeo.


[Editor's note: We're trying to track down the names of the artists who painted those book covers. If we can find them, we'll give credit.]

It's a Walpurgis Night

We've yammered before about Beltane, the Gaelic holiday on May 1 that traditionally marks the start of summer, as it's roughly halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice.

But today is April 30, and across Europe, those who give a hoot are lighting fires and toasting to the "other Halloween" known as Walpurgis Night, or more frequently, Walpurgisnacht.

Sitting on the opposite end of the calendar from Halloween/Samhain, Walpurgis Night behaves in a similar manner. It's believed that the barrier between our world and other worlds, especially the spirit world, is virtually non-existent on this night. Ghosts, demons and strange things will roam the land after sunset.

A strong association with witchcraft comes with Walpurgis Night, again, echoing the All Soul's/All Saint's dichotomy of Halloween and November 1. See, the Walpurgis refers to St. Walpurga, who is feted on May 1.

Naturally, to make things fair, the night before her feast, witches gather to do er, witchy things and non-witch types build bonfires to welcome summer ... and probably ward off malicious creeps from the nether realms. And that's Walpurgis Night.

Now, The Typing Monkey can't resist an opportunity to embrace the day and indulge in a little apple-blossom scented spookiness.

Thus:

Squeal! Can you stand it? If you didn't take us up on a previous Lovecraft recommendation, this is a workable compromise.

"The Call of Cthulhu" introduces Lovecraft's richly detailed horror mythology of the ancient Earth in a dynamite blast of fantasy pulp that reads like a mystery/adventure but delivers plenty of sci-fi haymakers in the form of wack-ass other-dimensional geometry, a sea-dwelling "god," and men driven insane by a totem that summons the beast.

Afraid of Lovecraft's text? Then take a short ride with deviantART madman DrFaustusAU* -- who has turned the tale into a Seussian nightmare, complete with illustrations.

His digital presentation starts at the bottom-right of the page, and moves up and to the left, so we've linked to page two of the collection, where the story actually begins. It's well executed and hits every vital part of the story.

A paper version is due eventually.


*It's pure kismet (or is it?) that we post DrFaustusAU's creation on Walpurgisnacht, as his user name reference the legend of the mad magician who sold his soul to the devil. You see, in Gounoud's opera, Faust, act two begins with a depiction of Walpurgisnacht in the devil's realm. Naturally, it's the sexiest part of the story.

Six

Tuesday Jan 21, 2014 was The Typing Monkey's sixth anniversary ... or birthday? What do you call the day that marks another year of blogging into the wind? Right. "Pointless." Very good.

[At this point in the conversation, our intern Kim was asked to clock out for the day. "Clock out? I don't even get paid," he said. Kim. Kim, c'mon. -- ed.]

To celebrate, we punish you with links culled from Arts & Letters Daily, our ongoing source of quality journalism, editorials and critical thinking that helps us remember there's more to this technology than bewbs and horror movie trailers.

"We need to talk about TED" by Benjamin Bratton
... in which a man gives a TED talk that points out everything wrong with TED talks. It's like he's saying what we're thinking.

"No, Jane Austen Was Not a Game Theorist" by William Deresiewicz 

... a call to resist and reject the post-Freakonomics/Gladwell trend in literary and art criticism to assert that modern, often trendy, scientific theories and ideas are the real themes and subtexts of many great works of art, history be damned.

"The Paratext's the Thing" by Thomas Doherty

"The irritating distractions have morphed into the main attractions."

Perhaps the thematic thread that connects these editorials is just in our imagination. But  we think they're complementary.

Freedom, and Then What?

Slate published Linda Rodriguez McRobbie's piece "The Real Victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse" on Jan 7. It's the story of Frances and Dan Keller's release from prison in Texas. They were convicted of child abuse in 1992 -- symbolically, there were jailed for taking part in Satanic ritual abuse.

Never share a seat on the bus again

They're free because the charges, the trial and most of the media coverage, were entirely lies. The endless pursuit of the truth from a local news reporter, and some patient lawyers, finally helped get the Kellers, now divorced, released from prison after a successful appeal.

The Typing Monkey recommends the book Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend by Jeffrey S. Victor if you'd like to read about the religious fervor/group think nightmare in the United States that began in the 1970s and reached a fever pitch by the late '80s and early '90s.

As McRobbie says in her Slate article: The real victims were those accused. We'd add to that the poor kids that were coached, cajoled and probably psychologically damaged by being forced to repeat (and imagine) what adults wanted to believe was happening. And what they believed is, frankly, unbelievable.

We sincerely hope both of the Kellers can find some peace and a path to resuming something resembling a normal life.

Peering Into the Dark: Lovecraft’s Great Depression

Once again, we gave TMI custodian Kris Kendall the assignment the rest of us were too lazy to tackle: Read a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories. Lovecraft's reputation makes for a daunting task, but in a surprise only slightly bigger than our realization that Kendall can read and write, the smelly bastard actually had something to say.


Read the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft during the dreary month of January.

The stories by the “godfather of modern horror” echo the long, dark, cold and soggy stretch of the first month of the year, when the carnival of the holiday season has left town. Bleakness rules all in January, and it’s the defining tone of Lovecraft’s work.

Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, selected and edited by Joyce Carol Oates, comes highly recommended and there’s good reason for that.

Her curation of the shorts and novellas builds logically, beginning with the “The Outsider” – a sort of character study that has been imitated so many times, it nearly suffers from its own influence.

Which isn’t to say it’s a bad story – on the contrary, Lovecraft builds to his big (obvious to modern readers) reveal skillfully, like a waltz for the doomed that ends in ugly, minor chords meant to shock and horrify.

Then the real recurring themes of what people think of as “Lovecraftian” begins with “The Music of Erich Zann” and “Rats in the Walls.”

The former introduces the idea that there are other worlds, other dimensions, near our own and that the barrier between them is thin, perhaps easily breached. While the latter introduces a theme that Lovecraft returns to in subsequent works: family lineage.

He writes of ancestry that reaches so far back in time that our brains can scarcely grasp the distance. And in that distance are ugly behaviors, ugly genetics, that ripple forward into the modern world.

“The Shunned House” – at least in the Oates collection – acts as a sort of rest stop before the big, well-known stories begin. And we’d argue that it’s a lesser tale, but it left too much of an impression. However, “Shunned” illuminates the major problem with Lovecraft: he rambles and repeats himself.

Like Charles Dickens and, to a lesser degree, Lovecraft's predecessor in horror, Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft writes as if he were paid by the word. He was. “Shunned” exposes the Lovecraft novice to the author’s tendency toward unnecessary length in pursuit of a bigger paycheck.

Lovecraft’s garrulous narrative is absent entirely from “The Call of Cthulhu.” The story was published in 1926, four years before Lovecraft would begin corresponding with fellow Weird Tales contributor Robert E. Howard. But it’s reasonable to aver that Lovecraft was reading Howard’s work by then. Perhaps Howard’s electric, two-fisted prose influenced the efficiency of “Cthulhu.”

Structured like the classic Victorian horror tales, “Cthulhu” begins with the declaration that it was “found among the papers of the late Frances Wayland Thurston, of Boston.” The opening paragraph stands as one of the best passages in this collection, a concise portent of what is to come, but also a clever assessment of why humankind seems incapable of advancing very far before collapsing.

Part murder mystery and part action yarn, “Cthulhu” introduces everything that would come be known as what Lovecraft associate and superfan, August Derleth, called “ the Cthulhu Mythos.”  There are ancient cults worshiping a beast straight out of Revelations, global conspiracies in place to deny the existence of those cults, and geometry so otherworldly, that human senses can’t properly perceive it.

Ringing, siren-like, above it all is the nightmare realization that beings from across the galaxy, and often from worlds outside our own universe, have been to Earth – some of them are still here, waiting for the right conditions to rise up again and snuff us out like spent matches.

Lovecraft revisits that idea repeatedly with “The Dunwich Horror,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and “The Shadow Out of Time.” In doing so, he expands his rogues gallery, subtly but methodically linking his beasts by showing how they fit together into a history pre-dating, and later concomitant to, our own journey out of the cave and into the false security of civilization.

But for all the monsters and mythology, an equal amount of the dread that permeates Lovecraft’s writing comes from his doomed heroes. In fact, his protagonists rarely qualify as heroes, as many of them end up dead, or mad, and always along the way, fall headlong into the deep isolation that comes with the knowledge they acquire.

Inside joke!

Without having read a proper biography of Lovecraft, it’s pure speculation that the man was probably depressed through most of his life. At the very least he was deeply cynical about the world – for he outright states multiple times that humans are not nearly so advanced or evolved as we like to think. If we don’t destroy ourselves first, there are plenty of outside forces just waiting for an opportunity to do the job for us.

He illustrates that anxiety well in “The Colour Out of Space.” The story concerns a New England farmer, in the rural hills west of Arkham, a stand-in for Salem, Massachusetts. A meteorite lands in the fields of the farm and poisons everything it touches, including the minds of the farmer and his family.

In pure book report terms: The corrosive power of a cosmic force could easily stand in for events in our mundane lives that are sometimes unbearable, and like the dying, mad farmer of “The Colour ...” those things can destroy us. But for some reason, or lack of reason, we are drawn to the destructive agents.

Lovecraft himself had what is described as a “nervous breakdown” before he graduated high school. Both his father and mother had similar events and both died within a few years of those breakdowns, though neither died as a direct result of the breakdown.

Knowing that fact makes the reading of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” a more potent experience. The story of an isolated fishing village in Massachusetts probably best embodies Lovecraft’s pet idea of family history and biology working in tandem to cast our fates in stone. None of us has progressed far past our ancestors.

But let’s leave the analysis for greater minds because “Innsmouth” is a ripping good tale. It’s the kind of creepshow dread that The X-Files did so well. An educated city dweller ventures into the rural unknown, where his status as an outsider is immediately recognized and used against him.

The last third of the story has more of that “Call of Cthulhu” action – an escape scene that takes up an entire night, where the simple task of leaving becomes nearly impossible.

And that brings us back to the beginning. No matter what T.S. Eliot says, January is the cruelest month. The nights are long, the days are dark. Cold and wet rule the forecast. February is January’s petulant little sister, so don’t worry if your journey into H.P. Lovecraft’s writing spills over into the weeks of Valentines and alleged whispers of spring. The terror is there to keep you company.

Dip Your Bowl Into the Cosmic Cauldron

We don't know a whole lot about the blog The Ghost of the Weed Garden, and we like it that way.

The person or people behind it go by an owlish tag that looks like this: {{{{o\/o}}}}

As you might imagine, that anonymity delights us.

On the site are music mixes  you can stream or download, scanned artwork from the covers of horror, fantasy and science fiction paperbacks, as well as covers from cryptic, sometimes self-published looking books on magick, philosophy and other occult oddities.

Honestly, it's the sort of stuff that would have made a much younger Typing Monkey freak out and think about church.

The most recent music mix posted on Weed Garden is titled "Cosmic Cauldron." And as the site itself says, it's packed top to bottom with "Psychedelic, Acid Folk, Kosmische, Electronic, Occult, [and] Haunted VHS."

We spun it today and it fit the sunny autumn afternoon just right. As the evening brought chilling fog, "Cosmic Cauldron" swirled with creepy acid folk, devilish weirdness and a few good dabs of resin-smeared psych.

Have fun.

Switchblades at Dawn

The Typing Monkey has never watched more than a few seconds of the animated Fox sitcom Bob's Burgers. We don't know why, it just never happened. Maybe someday.

Neither have we seen anything beyond a teaser clip for the Nickelodeon cartoon Sanjay and Craig.

Why are we giving an inventory of animated shows we've never seen? Because artist Jay Howell has a hand in both of those shows and we've just discovered his art blog.

One of the most creative and sly things Howell shares via his site, are the "book paintings" in which he paints a sort of illustration on the title page of a paperback. Most of the books are Harlequin romance novels:

When Howell interprets the title literally, as in the example above, it changes what we can assume the book is actually about. Try hard enough, and you can probably imagine what the real book cover looked like. You're probably not far off if you've seen a romance novel or two.

Howell makes them funny, absurd and creepy-cute. His site is full of these, and he even sells them. (We didn't check to see how much he charges.) But just getting to see them online makes his blog worth a look.

Yes, it's the sun covered in naked people. Somehow, Howell has tapped into the 9-year-old boy part of his brain that giggled when Huck Finn shouted "hump yourself" at Jim as the teacher read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn out loud in class.

The Naked Sun joke is so simple and Howell's depiction so elegant and profane that the viewer isn't so much angry that we didn't do it first, but rather overjoyed that somebody made this happen.

Not that Howell's art is all bewbs and knife fights. Go see  for yourself what happened when he took his brushes and pens to the title page of a paperback called Cast a Tender Shadow.


[Yet another enthusiastic nod to Monster Brains for turning us on to Howell's work.]

Dirty Deeds & the Men Who Investigate Them

Two book reviews that make us want both books in our possession:

Matthew Walther enjoyed Wretched Writing: A Compendium of Crimes Against the English Language by Ross and Kathryn Petras. The volume collects examples of head-scratching sentences from famous, and sometimes even reputable, authors. See what Walther's on about here via The Spectator.

The other comes from Josephine Livingstone, who we've tagged before, so I guess that makes us fans of her work. In her review of Bran Nicol’s The Private Eye: Detectives in the Movies, Livingstone is genuinely pleased that Nicol touches on a pet theory of hers: That the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo is a retelling of the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

And you know what? She's right. But it's Nicol's book she's discussing, and Livingstone gives it a scholarly scrubbing -- the kind of gimlet-eyed critical writing that doesn't happen often enough in the usual crap we read. Either way, The Private Eye sounds like catnip to us.

Readin' Dirty

The Typing Monkey tries to keep this blog as PG-13/SFW as possible. So understand that several of the links in this post contain pictures that might get you in trouble at work, or force you to have an uncomfortable conversation with a loved one. If your wife asks what you're doing, though, you can tell her in all honesty that you're reading The Paris Review.

***

All media are used as pornography delivery devices. And because that’s usually one of the first uses for a new medium, the history of pornographic books is the history of the book itself.

Writer Avi Steinberg looked into the library/porn connection for The Paris Review back in 2012. Thanks to J. Kingston Pierce’s blog Killer Covers of the Week, we discovered Steinberg’s essay, "Checking Out" and it’s a positively fun and enlightening read.

Steinberg, who worked as a librarian in a prison, declares midway through that "according to the pile of books I’d stacked onto my library desk, our story is nothing but the evolutionary history of the Porno sapiens."

And to that end, Steinberg arrives at a perfectly logical connection. Books can satisfy our prurient needs. Therefore, those who curate the books must have arcane knowledge of the erotic and esoteric, which lets us off at the final stop on this ride, the archetype of the “sexy librarian.”

For many, the very phrase conjures a sort of post-WWII pinup idea: A prim woman, with glasses and hair coiled into a bun. But once those glasses come off, and the hair is loosed, she’s a trick-underwear-sporting tigress in sensible heels, a variation on the Madonna/whore fantasy that’s come in and out of fashion over the decades.

As poet and librarian Stephanie Brown put it in her article “Sex in the Stacks” – “In the world of librarian porn, a sex maniac lives behind the lorgnette [and] those orthopedic shoes.”

Read her take on the books, and the idea, on The Best American Poetry blog. And notice there that she too, includes the cover of Les Tucker’s Nympho Librarian, a paperback that has also provided the two images we used for this post, primarily because it’s so funny and so neatly sums up the ideas discussed.

Books are sexy. Anybody who says otherwise probably hates reading. Stop associating with those people as your schedule allows, and go read something.

Yeah, But Have You Listened to Bach on Acid?

The Typing Monkey recently peered through the magic keyhole of On An Overgrown Path, a blog that holds a flickering candle into the odd corners of the world of classical music. Cancel your meetings and forward the phones, 'cause you're going to be doing some reading.

Overgrown Path's (sole?) contributor goes by the hand Pliable, and whoever that is, he or she is about to go away for a while and put the blog on hold. No matter. That will give you time to catch up.

To get you started, here are a few links to stories from Overgrown Path that will keep your attention:

From "JSB on LSD" -- "'Let me advise you, if you ever use mescaline or LSD in therapy, to try the effect of [Johann Sebastian Bach's] B-minor suite.'" That's an excerpt from a letter Aldous Huxley wrote to psychiatrist Humphry Osmond. The B-minor suite will always trump Pink Floyd.

And do make sure to read the one-two punch about Edward Elgar, who has a gossamer connection to early LSD experiments, and a clear connection to the Order of the Golden Dawn. Who knew?

There's much more to On An Overgrown Path -- listening and reading recommendations galore -- so have fun.

Reading About Reading: Demoniacs and Things Under the Bed

Josephine Livingstone's "When Nuns Puked Nails" reviews the book The Devil Within by Brian Levack. The book examines the phenomenon of demonic possession, concentrating on the act's heyday in the 16th and 17th centuries. Her review was published on Prospect magazine's blog.

Livingstone manages to get in a little more literary critique into a book review than most of us are used to, thanks to Prospect allowing for more muscular writing than mainstream media makes room for these days.

Not having read Devil Within, we have no basis for debate with Livingstone, but it's clear she enjoyed the book and her review makes us want to read it. Especially this portion of her review:
"Popular apocalyptic thought—the strong suspicion that the final battle between good and evil was under way—made possession seem reasonable, even expected. The devil (or his attendant demons) taking control of your body was like the forces of evil saving seats at the cinema by putting coats on them."

And she points out that much of the Catholic procedure of exorcism at that time followed what amounted to a script, with even the possessed (usually a woman) knowing their role in the event.

On a similar topic, Peter Stanford reviewed Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters by Matt Kaplan, for The Telegraph. Stanford never uses the term "fortean" but he's nearly there regarding his admiration for Kaplan's approach to answering the question: Why do we want to believe in monsters?

Kaplan, at least per Stanford, doesn't pass judgment on any of the believers, nor does he insist that the psychological or scientific "answers" are the only truth. If that's not in the spirit of Charles Fort, then let's fold up the internets and go home.

Kaplan's book shot to number one with a silver bullet on The Typing Monkey's reading list.

Quiz Time: Facial Expressions & Literature

Look at these pictures of Ray Bradbury:

The black and white image was taken in 1938, when the writer was a senior at high school in Waukegan, Illinois.

The color image was snapped in 1975 after he'd already published Farenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Halloween Tree.

One of these men can stare deep into the very core of your emotional brain and memories of childhood. He can mold your sensations like a sculptor with clay, causing you to feel weird surges of sweetness and regret, triggering great joy and exhilaration, suspense and fear, conjuring melancholy you want to wrap around yourself like a blanket against the cold.

Which of these men can do this?

[To see the answer, select this text: Dude, they're both Ray Bradbury. He is a crafty genius and you should read one of his stories as soon as you can.]

Journey Round His Skull

Will Schofield's astounding art blog 50 Watts will eat up all your spare time. You have been warned.

[Selection from the gallery "Children's Books in Poland: The 1960s." The '70s collection is every bit as good.]

The Tinkelman Terrors

Monster Brains does it again (and again and again ...) with a Jan 8 posting of various covers and interior illustrations Murray Tinkelman did for H.P. Lovecraft (and Lovecraft-inspired) stories.

[Interior illustration -- duplicated on cover -- for "The Mask of Cthulhu" by August Derleth]

The cheerless cold and soggy dark of January is as good a time as any to read some Lovecraft. The Typing Monkey's only cracked one of his tales, and that was before the Clinton administration.

Just as we finally paid proper attention this past summer to Ray Bradbury, Howard Phillips Lovecraft is on the docket, via a lauded collection of shorts and novellas curated by Joyce Carol Oates. We're already scared.

With these Tinkelman works to inspire our eyes, the anticipation mounts. See more of Tinkelman's work here.

"It is usually about murder ... "

At some point in your life, maybe not this very moment, but some time in the future, you will hear reference to Raymond Chandler's "how to write a good mystery story" guide disguised as a critical essay "The Simple Art of Murder."

You will wonder: "Have I read that?" Which means you probably haven't. Luckily, the University of Texas at Austin's American Literature Archive has made it easy to read Chandler's incisive work anywhere you have access to the Web. From 1950's ink-on-paper, to your 21st century electronic device: ta da!

And, should you care, they also have a virtual copy of Flannery O'Connor's 1960 essay "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction."

Ghosts Eat Marshmallows

This isn’t a book review because we haven’t been able to find a copy of this book and the last time anyone here at The Typing Monkey read The Marshmallow Ghosts by Priscill and Otto Friedrich, was too long ago to remember specific details.*

In essence, the story tracks a family of ghosts who’ve emigrated from Ireland to the United States, and the ghost kids – that’s right, ghost kids – want to experience Halloween American style. In doing so, the spirit children find that if they eat marshmallows, their ghostly vapors turn solid, allowing them to go trick-or-treating like kids who aren’t ghosts.

We bring all this up as a seasonally appropriate gateway to remind you of the illustrations (and also writing) of Louis Slobodkin. Go back to the books you read as a kid and chances are one of them was illustrated by him.

Sadly, the website dedicated to Slobodkin’s work went dark sometime during the past year, but Page Books has a fairly robust Slobodkin page with a good cover gallery.

Whether illustrating his own writing, the collaborations with his wife, or the work of others, there’s an utterly charming post-War warmth to Slobodkin’s art.



*[Sincerely, if you find a copy of The Marshmallow Ghosts snap it up. It's long out of print and we won't mind if you mail it to us.]