A Few More for the Collection

I have to confess that the project is slipping behind schedule, although in my defence for honourable reasons. One of them is a month long fundraising campaign supporting the German Shepherd Dog Welfare Fund - the charity that rescued Wellington who I adopted 18 months ago. I'm also volunteering with them. There are some excellent Halloween themed items you can bid on:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/authorne_50/m.html?item=364019964173&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.m3561.l2562

Of course, that doesn't prevent me from adding a few more books to the collection :-)

The Globe Edition (1934) - The Poetical Works of John Milton

 

I do already have an older version of this edition and it's unfortunate that they look almost exactly the same. And the separation of 30+ years indicates that there are a fair few of these. However, as I'm entering a 'Gotta Catch Em All' frame of mind there'll no doubt be a shelf full of these at some stage!

Okay, now I've placed them side by side the new one is small and puny in comparison :-)

Milton Paradise Lost - Longman Paperback (1986)

 

The 80s were my teen years and I guess they'll never seem that long ago to me. Even if my mind refuses to accept that 40-odd years is a reasonable time period, it is quite short considering the history of the source. However, it does have a couple of interesting aspects. The first is that it's aimed at an academic audience and has a considerable number of annotations bringing clarity to the more obscure references.

There's also a small personal story attached to it, all told by a sticker on the first front matter page. In the class of 85-86 a young lady named Sarah won this copy as Miss Boddington's prize for History at Norwich High School. I wonder if she had an interest in the book, or if it was a standard prize.

Paradise Lost The Novel by Joseph Lanzara

This was an accidental find after discovering the author's website - https://www.paradiselost.org/index-desk.html It is an interesting website with some useful information without being too dense. I can't comment on the novel (yet) as I haven't read, but certainly will do at some stage. I'm a fan of any attempt to allow Paradise Lost reach and ever wider audience.

The Space Inbetween

This is probably my favourite piece of contemporary art, and as we'll soon find out that's a good job really! It was created by the wonderfully talented Luciana Nedelea in Romania - check out some of her other work here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYKj25lAl6prWllMAZ2S8VA

A3 prints with various designs
are available here
 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/364002142966

She's probably best known for her album cover art, but I've worked with her on t-shirt designs, a Cthulhu themed chess set and a book cover. And that was the original idea for this painting, it was to be the cover for a Lovecraft-Milton (the two most inspirational writers) crossover with the working title 'The Space Inbetween'.

The story's premise was to accept both Milton's and Lovecraft's worlds at face value and then explore that reality. And so we have the story of creation, God creates the physical universe we know and mankind falls from grace and despite that evolves to become masters of the stars. Unbeknownst to almost every living being  (except God and a few with special insight) God created the universe from the wreckage of a much older universe. That universe was the domain of the pantheon Lovecraft described in his mythos and the gods of humanity destroyed them in a war that saw nearly every diety also annihilated. 

The multiverse is a battleground of competing entities, some powerful enough to create universes of their own, but others use different methods. Our universe was then formed from the bones of the original creators, their followers and the upstart gods lost in the battle. It is their remains that formed the matter and energy we see around us. More than that it also forms the fabric of the universe, the essence of spacetime and the vast voids inside the atomic building blocks. 

The intensity of the Big Bang and the continual transformation of matter and energy erased any memory of the dead gods and elder beings - except those fragments in the void. At the height of humanity's worldly power, it develops technology capable of tearing the fabric of space and stirring the reformation of those once sundered. The memories of beings long lost filter into reality and so starts a war of cosmic scale for the possession of creation.

I really should actually write the story at some stage :-) For inspiration, I commissioned Luciana to work on a cover for it and here we have the result. While it was soon clear that the piece wasn't suited for a book cover (especially in the era of online stores and their tiny thumbnails) it did capture the core concepts as I'd imagined them. It also inspired an idea of how to tell the story in a different fashion that I really need to explore one day as I don't think I've seen it done before (although it probably has!).

Even though it hasn't yet been used for its intended purpose the image did have one major evolution to come. As part of my midlife crisis, I decided to have some tattoos done and I wanted something unique for the backpiece I loved how Luciana's picture told the story and the detail of it. And so I had it tattooed on my back!

The tattoo is actually bigger than the original painting :-)

This amazing image (along with some other great images) is available as an A3 print as part of the Halloween Horror Auction supporting the German Shepherd Dog Welfare Fund. Grab one for yourself now, and why not some as presents for friends - there's a multi-buy discount) here:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/364002142966

Other designs available: