Modcult

‘But,’ said the Empress, ‘there is some likeness between maggots and cheese, for cheese has no blood, nor maggots neither; besides, they have almost the same taste which cheese has.’ ‘This proves nothing,’ answered they, ‘for maggots have a visible, local, progressive motion which cheese hath not.’ The Empress replied that when all the cheese was turned into maggots it might be said to have local, progressive motion. They answered that when the cheese by its own figurative motions were changed into maggots it was no more cheese.

– Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (1666)

PostSpectacular has designed a system for creating one of a kind covers for Faber Finds, Faber’s print-on-demand service. The generative design system is built using PHP, Java, and Processing.

The gorgeous font used on the covers is B-HMMND, designed by Corey Holms.

More images can be found here.

He’d Make Such a Beautiful Corpse

I love this somewhat creepy letter to readers from Åsa Larsson, former tax lawyer and author of several chilling thrillers set in rural Sweden, explaining how she came up with the victim for her first book, The Savage Altar, which was published by Penguin in the UK by for the first time.

NEVER trust an author. He or she is perfectly capable of taking everything you say or do and making it into a lovely soup to serve up to his or her readers. Never let an author into your house.

Then I caught sight of some photographs standing on a cupboard there in her kitchen. They were pictures of Lena’s children and her nieces and nephews. And in one of the photographs was her eldest son, Fredrik. It was as if an electric shock ran through me when I looked at the picture of him. He’d grown up so much. When I lived in Kiruna, he was just a little boy. But this picture showed a young man.

He’s so good looking, I thought, experiencing a real jolt at how quickly time passes, and the fact that nothing lasts forever.

He had long, fair hair. And I knew he played the violin.

He looks like a saint, I thought.

Then I thought:

He’d make such a beautiful corpse.

Her friend’s response upon reading the finished manuscript and being asked permission:

“Fine,” she said in her terse Kiruna way when she’d finished reading it. “You can publish it. But you’re not spending any time alone with our children from now on.”

The Savage Altar was published in the United States in 2006 as Sun Storm. Åsa Larsson’s newest book, The Black Path, was published in August.

Lovecraft Meets Bladerunner

Gene Wolfe’s newest novel, An Evil Guest is now available for preorder, and set to be released on September 16th.

I linked Neil Gaiman’s review of a draft a while back, but the Amazon page has some more information.

It seems Wolfe indulges himself in a bit of a genre stew– mixing noir’s private detectives, Broadway glitter, sorcerers, iPods, cold war intrigue, and Cthulhu, itself.

From Caitlín R. Kiernan’s blurb:

The distinctions we draw between past, present, and future are discriminations among illusions. This paraphrase of Einstein stands as a sort of thesis statement for this deliriously anachronistic novel, which, though seemingly set near or at the end of the 21st century, feels more like a wild confabulation of the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, with a bit of the ’80s sprinkled here and there, and just a dash of the first decade of our new millennium.

Even as Wolfe warps time and space, he also warps and dismisses the too often indulged expectations of genre readers. There is no slavish devotion to dull futurism, but a swaggering, romantic, unabashedly unlikely tomorrowland.

Really, really poor cover choice though. Luckily, the UK edition appears to have a more tasteful design, thankfully avoiding the goth-vampire-meets-fairy-romance cover of the US version.

One of Gustave Doré’s numerous illustrations for Rabelais’ Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel.

Thus, said Panurge; for when with pleasure I beheld this jolly fire, jesting with myself, and saying—Ha! poor flies, ha! poor mice, you will have a bad winter of it this year; the fire is in your reeks, it is in your bed-straw—out come more than six, yea, more than thirteen hundred and eleven dogs, great and small, altogether out of the town, flying away from the fire. At the first approach they ran all upon me, being carried on by the scent of my lecherous half-roasted flesh, and had even then devoured me in a trice, if my good angel had not well inspired me with the instruction of a remedy very sovereign against the toothache. And wherefore, said Pantagruel, wert thou afraid of the toothache or pain of the teeth? Wert thou not cured of thy rheums? By Palm Sunday, said Panurge, is there any greater pain of the teeth than when the dogs have you by the legs?

More Penguin cookery book covers can be found here.

Lexicon Urthus Second Edition Now Available

Our flagship product, Lexicon Urthus, which has been out of print since 2002, is available again in a new, expanded edition.

• The new edition has 1200 entries (up from 950 in first edition).
• The new edition is 440 pages (up from 304).
• All the corrections (and most of the additions) of the AE& series and NS-1 are included.
• All the named characters are added.
• The new edition is available for the first time in paperback.

Time to upgrade, Finn. You can pick it up in person next time you are in Berkeley, at one of the fine safe-havens for Gene Wolfe fans: Dark Carnival or (and how did I not know this place existed?) Other Change of Hobbit.

Had to post Coralie Bickford-Smith’s eye-catching cover for the Penguin’s current “Boys Own Books” edition of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, featuring illustrations by Mick Brownfield. You can see more of Bickford-Smith’s covers for the Boys Own series at Penguin’s Flickr page.

Bickford-Smith is also responsible, along with partner/illustrator Mike Topping, for the new round of Sherlock Holmes covers Penguin, inspired by vintage movie posters. There’s a nice walkthrough of their collaborative process by Mike and Coralie accompanied by pictures of the covers over at Scamp.

As a side note, the recent Penguin Classics collections all look quite fantastic and it’s a struggle not to pick up these new editions whenever I am lingering in a bookstore.

Looks to be nerdiest shirt I’ve seen this year… Inspired by Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game. Of course, I would have chosen some of Raskin’s own cover artwork. I’m happy to see the current Modern Classics edition has (mostly) restored the lovely original artwork and retired the banal covers from the 80’s and 90’s.