Well, that's different...

[ffutures]

I just scanned another disaster story, Robert Barr's "Within an Ace of the End of the World," which is an interesting precursor of Doyle's The Poison Belt but written in 1900 and with a less happy ending - sixteen survivors, 8 British men and 8 American women, who are the only ones to take the oncoming crisis seriously and survive in hermetically sealed buildings. The rest of the human race dies rather nastily...

One of its interesting features is that the artist used an illuminated letter at the start of each section, with the illumination actually relevant to the story. Most are T's. If anyone's interested they're below the cut





VERY hard to imagine anyone doing that today.

This one will probably go on line sooner or later, since it may be moderately important in the history of SF.

Comments

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

Huh, Barr was a Canadian after a fashion -- educated at what is now Ryerson University here in Toronto.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, just read his biography. I've put a couple of his stories on line previously, and there's an article about wrestling (I think) on the FF CD-ROM.

[freifraufischer.livejournal.com]

Looked up the story, interesting, kind of tempted to read it now. It reminds me of this (overdramatized but based on reality story) How a Biotech Company Almost Killed the World With Booze from his book about how Everything is going to kill everybody.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

If you'd like to take a look I'd be happy to send you the files - might be a couple of megabytes including the illos, I haven't actually worked out exact file size yet. I don't want to put it on line for the moment, because I will need to use a lot of space for the Army and Navy Store files and I don't want to come up short for other things.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Forgot to say, that is a truly scary biotech story. What the hell were they thinking?

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

Predates The Purple Cloud, too, then.

I could imagine Alasdair Gray doing illuminations like that.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Certainly. But most publishers want things done cheap, not right.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

There was an article in The Independent today about Gray. (It's the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Lanark.) It mentioned a book he promised his publishers in 1986. It came out last year.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

That's beautiful. One of the books from which my grandmother used to read to me had something similar. I can't remember what it was, possibly Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The artist was called H.Lanos, I've never seen any other work by him, but it's possible he illustrated your book. He seems to have illustrated When The Sleeper Awakes in 1928, can't find out anything else about him.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Just found an article about the artist

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Lanos

No English version, and it doesn't really say much other than a list of books he illustrated.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I've now learned he died in 1932, so it's legal for me to use his art.