José Guadalupe Posada (1852 – 1913)...illustrated covers for Biblioteca del niño mexicano, commisioned in 1900

Book cover... illustrations by Genesis P-Orridge for Terence Sellers ... The Correct Sadist... 1983/1990

''All the so-called terrors of solitude console me. The resonant silence of the evening's end, as the stars come into their own is a pleasure I cannot share with anyone - though some do seem sensitive enough. I often awake alone, with the echo of an uncertain sound from the house below fading in my ears . . . I leap from the bed directly and rush to meet the intruders. Perhaps once a week I have such an adventure. But no one is ever there." TS

Books ...Magica De Spectris...Henning Grosse...1656

Pascal Beverly Randolph... Eulis “Affectional Alchemy” book covers ... 1930

The book, in German "Die sexualmagischen Lehren der Bruderschaft von Eulis", was originally

published by Randolph (1825-1875) in 1874 with the founding of The Brotherhood of Eulis ("Hermetische Bruderschaft vonLuxor"), presumably to work sex-magic. Randolph also founded the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, the oldest Rosicrucian

organization in the United States

excerpt...

So far well; but at last the world wants to know more of that wonderful fraternity, which, nameless at times for long centuries, blossomed a few centuries ago as Rosicrucia, but now has leaped to the fore-front of all the real reform movements of this wondefu1 age, and lo! the banner of peerless Eulis floats proudly—rock founded — on the breeze. We, the people of Eulis, be it known, are students of nature in her interior departments, and rejecting alike the coarse materialism of the ages, and the sham “philosophies” of the ages past and current, accept only that which forces conviction by its irresistible logic. Men who realize the existence of other worlds than this are not apt to give loose rein to passion; nor be content with fraud in any shape. We cannot take say-sos for facts, and therefore we reject much that appeals to others with the force of truth. We are ambitious to solve all possible mystery; we prefer one method to all other hyper-human agencies, knowing it to be infinitely preferable to all other modes of rapporting the occult and mysterious; and this book, and all others from the same pen, is but a very imperfect sketch or outline of the sublime philosophy of the Templars of EULIS. We know the enormous importance of the sexive principle; that a menstruating woman is an immense power if she but knew it! that a pregnant one holds the keys of eternal mystery in her hand, and that while thus she can make or mar any human fortune! We know the mystic act is one unhinging the gates alike, of heaven and of hell; and we know two semi-brainless people may, by an application of esoteric principles, stock the 

world with mental giants. But where shall we find students? Are not all the people, nearly, the slaves of lust, place, gold? Well, we find one now and then; and we hail him or her as the Greeks hailed the sea— with excessive joy! Thalatta! Thalatta! They are not multitudinous now, but will be in the good time coming. 

Randolph’s “Rosicrucian Apology” from the first chapter of Eulis!, “Affectional Alchemy” (1874)

Jindřich Štyrský ...graphic works... Sny (dreams) c1970

more HERE

The Story of the Eye ...Andre Masson..book cover

Cover sketch for George Bataille's Story of the Eye - first edition 1928 - André Masson

"And it struck me that death was the sole outcome of my erection, and if Simone and I were killed, then the universe of our unbearable personal vision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars, fully unrelated to any external gazes and realizing in a cold state, without human delays or detours, something that strikes me as the goal of my sexual licentiousness: a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating..."

 George Bataille's Story of the Eye

 previous post > George Bataille

Book Covers ....& etc

from the unique Portuguese publishing house & etc some wonderful covers :

more here and here

Book cover... Ch Avalanche

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin... book cover & poems...

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1872–1936) was a symbolist poet, prose writer, and playwright. Openly gay, he wrote the first celebrations of
gay themes in Russian literature, and the first Russian coming-out novel, Wings (1907), in which a young man learns to accept his sexuality, which makes him feel as if he has grown wings. Kuzmin too was a poet who mined his own biography,incorporating its associations
and events in his poem-cycles.

Wings.Story in Three Parts(Krylya) cover by Nikolai Petrovich Feofilaktov

~Poems~

Sun, Sun

Sun, sun,
divine Ra-Helios,you delight
the hearts of kings and heroes,
sacred horses neigh to you,
in Heliopolis they sing hymns to you;
when you shine,
lizards crawl out onto rocks
and boys go laughing
to swim in the Nile.
Sun, sun,
I am a pale scribbler,
a library recluse,
but I love you, sun, no less
than a tanned sailor
smelling of fish and salt water,
and no less
than his accustomed heart
rejoices
at your royal rising
from the ocean,
my heart trembles,
when your dusty, but flaming ray
slips
through the narrow window by the ceiling
onto my filled page
and my thin, yellowish hand,
writing out in vermilion
the first letter of a hymn to you,
O Ra-Helios sun!

The Sense Of Your Bidding

The sense of your bidding is unclear:
to pray, to curse, is it, to fight
you bid me, inscrutable genius?
The spring slackens, niggard, meager,
and Benozzo Gozzoli's courier
dozes in the drowsy thickets.

Hills are dark with honeyed cloud.
Look: I do not touch lithe strings.
Your gaze, prophetically flying,
is clenched, gushes no winged streams,
and beckons by no May road, trying
to outstrip Hermes in his flight.

Hobbled horses do not neigh,
Aging warriors sprawl in disarray...
Hold your palms open wide!
Risen spring is bright,
but groves of darkness are not given
to leap for joy having leapt from dreams.

The groom names not the hour,
be not guiled to tarry,
hark through ice the clarion voice,
your flax is drenched with chrism,
and, bidding goodbye to numb laze,
free, in love, you will rise.

Jean Genet.... book inscription & cover

Ramón María del Valle-Inclán...The Lamp Of Marvels...

A unique account by a great mystical poet of his search to realize Beauty, Truth, and Goodness in his life and in his art.




Ramón del Valle Inclán (1866–1936) was Spanish writer and a member of the Generation of ‘98. Valle Inclán was deeply influenced by foreign literary trends, especially by modernismo. An eccentric who cultivated bizarre legends about himself, he published a collection of sensational, erotic tales, Femeninas (1895). He used himself as the model for the old libertine hero of his Sonatas (1902–1905), translated as The Pleasant Memoirs of the Marquis de Bradomín (1924). His symbolist aesthetic is expressed in his poetic works such as Aromas de leyenda (1907). Among his plays are Águila de blasón ("Eagle of Honor," 1907), in prose, and La Marquesa Rosalinda (1913) in verse. In his later works he satirized Spanish life in grotesque caricatures he called esperpentos, including Luces de Bohemia (1920).

Spanish book covers...