The book also includes a fulsome biography of the artist, covering his life and work. For The Bodley Head, he designed covers for Agatha Christie titles, whilst his celebrated jacket for The Wind in the Willows was produced for Methuen.Wyndham Payne presents a detailed survey of the artist's work: lino cuts, woodcuts, drawings in pen, watercolours, silhouette painting on glass, and later, when his health became too poor for commercial work, models - including automata - for his children and grandchildren. Aside from creating illustrations for the Beaumont Press, Payne was also commissioned by Oxford University Press and Hodder & Stoughton, among others. Working in the tradition of Claud Lovat Fraser - and others - Payne nurtured a reputation for freedom of line, illustrating books, calendars, greetings cards and advertisements, often with toys - soldiers, model theatres, trains - as a subject.
#Automaton books series#
A new title in ACC Art Books' celebrated Design series, presenting and reviving the work of illustrator Wyndham Payne (1884-1974).Wyndham Payne's career as an illustrator began in the early 1920s, gathering momentum with a series of book illustrations for renowned Charing Cross publisher Cyril Beaumont. Incorporating texts generated by a multinational oil company, and spliced with a variety of found material (video games, home decor magazines, works by Henry James and Carl Jung), Battler deliberately tampers with her found material, treating it as crude oil-excavating, mixing, and drilling these texts to emulate extraction processes used by the industry.With traces of Dennis Lee's Testament, Larissa Lai's Automaton Biographies, and Adam Dickinson's The Polymers, this lively and refreshing take on a polarizing topic will resonate with readers of contemporary poetry who connect with environmental issues and capitalist critique. Using pastiche and wordplay, Battler shines a floodlight on the absurdity and pervasiveness of production language in all areas of human life in the oil fields, including art, culture and politics. Endangered Hydrocarbons, Lesley Battler's first full-length collection of poetry, shows that the language of hydrocarbon extraction, with its blend of sexual imagery, archetype, science, pseudoscience and the purely speculative, can be as addictive as the resource it pursues. The ultimate goal of the industry: To core the underworld. This is the language of our oil-addicted 21st century society: incredibly invasive, blatant in its purpose, and richly embedded in mythological and archetypal symbolism. Fracking - tar-sand runoff - dirty oil extraction. Written in a theatrical style and illustrated with original gouache paintings, Marvellous Magicians is the perfect book for all aspiring magicians. For its finale, Marvellous Magicians explores the hidden societies who have kept the secrets of illusions closely guarded for decades, provides advice on becoming a magician and introduces readers to contemporary magicians from around the world including Australia, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, UK and USA. Two spectacular fold-out pages reveal the secret workings of the Automata Chess Player and Howard Thurston's dramatic transformation of an empty box into a world of wonders, while themed spreads explore the early history of magic, the eight effects of magic on which all tricks are based, the magician's tool box, and the under-appreciated role of the magician's assistant. They include one of the first female magicians, Adelaide Herrmann, and African American illusionist Richard Potter, alongside such well-known greats as Houdini and his namesake and inspiration, Houdin. Through a magical blend of biography, history and illustration, it brings these amazing magicians and their illusions into the spotlight. Marvellous Magicians celebrates the work of eight pioneering illusionists, both famous and under-represented, whose tricks have been the making of modern magic.