Lettice Sandford, née Mackintosh Rate, (1902-1993) ..illustrations

Lettice Sandford was born Lettice Mackintosh Rate in St Albans, Hertfordshire. She was one of the foremost female wood engravers of the between-the-wars engraving boom, and illustrated many fine press editions; her husband Christopher Sandford was proprietor of the Golden Cockerel Press one of my favourites along with Black Sun Press.

from Song of Songs

from The Golden Bed of Kydno 

more Lovely Books

Julio Ruelas(1870-1907) ... Mexico... Mujer alacrán 1904

Leo Fontan... Faunesse!

Alan Sillitoe...Poem

Alan Sillitoe, 4 March 1928 – 25 April 2010.

Hannes Bok

sonnet: love

Love is not to be sought and known

When a mere comet-flash means dark

Oncoming doom. Who seek Love stand alone--
(Do not dream what visitations mark

The final pain of procreative world,

What blood-bellied moons of solstice red

Shine at myrtle-berried midnight)--are killed

In stone-cold bodies never brought to bed.

Love is antique, no fickle mind

Can satisfy it; and never Hope will gain

An entrance to loins that like a wind

Spin a black night into a wheel of pain:

Not to know, and a tiger's black and gold,

Can the vast orbit of Love's pleasure hold. 

Hannes Bok... illustrator

E.M. Lilien...from Die Bucher der Bibel... The Floating Clouds..

more at  Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism

E M Lilien ..The Occult and Love

E M Lilien ..Die Bucher der Bibel...

           Satan appears before the Divine Presence

Rose O'Neill...illustrator... drawings...

Ilna Caroline Wunderwald-Ewers...illustrator...1952

Hans Steiner...1896

 

The Songs of Bilitis... Willy Pogany & Pierre Louÿs...

I sing my flesh and my life...
Stay softly couched, oh, my body, according to your voluptuous mission! Taste daily joys and passions whose tomorrow never comes. Leave no pleasure unexplored, lest you regret the evening of your death....

The Songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs

 

Eugène Courboin (1851-1915) : Artiste du livre en 1895...

more from >>

le bibliomane moderne

Jan Marcin Szancer (1902-1973)...Poland... sketch...

Julius Klinger... 1909...

The Marquis Franz Von Bayros (1866-1924) ...

Alastair...L'Anniversaire de l'Infante ... Oscar Wilde...

Published by Harry and Caresse Crosby at their Black Sun Press 1928


more Black Sun Press & Alastair

Devour the fire...Harry Crosby 2 Poems... illustration Alastair...

± RED SKELETONS, 1927 ±

TEMPLE DE LA DOULEUR

My soul has suffered breaking on the wheel,
Flogging with lead, and felt the twinging ache
Of barbéd hooks and jagged points of steel,
Peine forte et dure, slow burning at the stake,
Blinding and branding, stripping on the rack,
The canque and kourbash and the torquéd screw,
The boot and branks, red scourging on the back,
The gallows and the gibbet. All for you.

These tortures are as nothing to the pain
That I have suffered when you gaze at me
With cold disdainful eyes. You do not deign
To smile or talk or even set me free-
Yet once you let me hold your perfumed hand
And danced with me a stately saraband.

SALOME

Proud panoply of fans and frankincense,
Gold blare of trumpets, flowered robes of state,
Unnumbered symbols of magnificence,
To lead Salome through the palace gate,
Where loud the prophet of the Lord blasphemes
The red abominations of her race
And chides her for her flesh-entangled dreams
and turns his back upon her painted face.

Thus do we turn from some red-shadowed lust
That through the broken forests of the brain
Weaves silently with tentacles out-thrust,
Groping in darkness, but for one in vain,
For like a sliding sun the soul has fled
Leaving a princess and a vultured head.

¤ SUN-TESTAMENT ¤

Marcus Behmer (1879-1955)...pen and ink drawings

 

Edgar Allan Poe by Satty...

a scan from one of my favourite books

Wilfried Satty 1976 from The Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe