Monstrous Monday

The Gnoles drag away screaming the unlucky Tonker from a story by Lord Dunsany. 'And where they took him it is not good to ask, and what they did with him I shall not say.' The illustration is by Dunsany's regular, Sidney Sime (1912).

Weird Wednesday

Time for some more Sidney Sime and not one, not two, but three. The top one is an illustration to one of Lord Dunsany's books, The Gods of Pegana. It looks like a psychedelic poster from the late 60s, but it was actually drawn in 1905. The one below is also for a Dunsany, this time The King of Elfland's Daughter. It's not the best reproduction (nor the best scan) but it shows the layering effect, with detailed foregrounds and fuzzy cosmic backgrounds that are a trademark of Virgil Finlay's work (see last week). If Finlay wasn't a big fan of Sime's I'll eat my Strands.

Those two come from the only book I can find on Sime (Sidney Sime: Master of the Mysterious by Simon Henege and Henry ford, published in 1980), which is unfortunately printed on soft, grainy paper. The final intensely eerie image is one I found in a 1901 copy of Pall Mall Magazine. Sime contributed a lot to Pall Mall and I keep hoping to find more. It illustrates an obscure yarn about a cursed family. This is heaven for me, the reason I keep spending moolah on these Victorian/Edwardian magazines - an obscure macabre tale illustrated by a superb artist. Fab.

Don't forget to click on the pic if you want to see it in its fuller glory.

Monstrous Monday

Mondays are often monstrous and therefore each deserves at least one monster to go with it.

This is The Prapsnot, drawn by Sidney Sime for a book of Bogey Beasts published in 1923 (many years before Ricky Gervais's Flanimals). Sime is one of my favourite illustrators, as well-known as Arthur Rackham in his day but now sadly neglected. In my opinion he was the most influential of the Victorian/Edwardian fantasy artists, his work certainly inspiring the great pulp illustrators like Virgil Finlay as well as the psychedelic imagery of the late 1960s.

Bogey Beasts was a bit of fun, however. It contained 15 monsters made-up by Sime, who also contributed some lines of doggerel verse ('jingles' he called them) to accompany each one, with a muscial score for each composed by one Josef Holbrooke (about whom I know nothing). It was published in very small numbers and is jolly rare: a facsimile reprint was made in 1975 by a small press, and I had to pay a bit just for that, and send off to Amercia for it.

No doubt I shall shove up a few more Bogey Beasts on forthcoming Monstrous Mondays, and definitely some more work by Sime from time to time. Meanwhile, here are the first few lines of the Prapsnot jingle:

'They have no Prapsnot

In

The Zoo,

And if you ask

The Keeper

The reason

Why?

He'll look askew,

And slowly

Wink his peeper.'