Sime's moody Sphinx

Another of Sime's pictures that Lord Dunsany used as the springboard for one of the stories in The Book of Wonder. This is "The House of the Sphinx":

When I came to the House of the Sphinx it was already dark. They made me eagerly welcome. And I, in spite of the deed, was glad of any shelter from that ominous wood. I saw at once that there had been a deed, although a cloak did all that a cloak may do to conceal it. The mere uneasiness of the welcome made me suspect that cloak.

Read on here.

More of the Sime

This is for Peter Richardson, artist and co-creator of the marvellous Cloud 109 and host of the fascinating blog that bears its name. If you would like to read the stories that Lord Dunsany spun around Sime's pictures, "The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller" is here and "How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles" (illustrated above) is here. It looks as though you can buy the whole book on Kindle - or for reading in the Kindle App on iPhone, take your pick. I heartily recommend it to aficionados of Edwardian English (well, Anglo-Irish) fantasy.

Neglected genius: the art of Sidney Sime

That’s where Virgil Finlay got his trademark starry effect. You can just see it, can’t you, as the illustration for a Grey Mouser tale in Unknown? Except that this fellow is not the Mouser but Thangobrind the Jeweller, alarmed by an ominous cough when Fritz Leiber Jr was still in his playpen.

After a lecture at Cornell in which Lord Dunsany had mentioned his longtime collaborator, the artist Sidney Sime, somebody said what a perfect name Sime was for him. “I don’t know,” said Dunsany; “I think Rhibelungzanedroom would suit him better.”

Which bothers me, because firstly I want some of what Dunsany used to smoke - but also because I would really like to know how Sime’s name was pronounced. Some books say “seem”, and the Cornellian’s comment would appear to bear that out. And yet I have spoken to friends of the Sime family in Worplesdon, who assure me that it rhymes with “lime”. So there’s a bit of a mystery, eh?

Eating strawberries in Dunsany’s garden at Dunstall Priory, Sime remarked, “Last year I think summer was on a Wednesday.” Later he went for a walk through Shoreham and an old lady asked him the time. “Later than it has ever been, madam,” he replied.

From Gallipoli, depressed by the high rate of casualties among his men, Dunsany sent a letter to Sime, the seal engraved as usual with a little human figure. Sime wrote back: “The god on your seal received due salutations from me. I can guess from the sinister gleam of satisfaction in his eye that he has just created a world a little bit worse than this one.”

Wells and Lady Gregory and A.E. Russell - that was the company Sime kept. (He did not much get on with Wells.) Lady Dunsany liked him very much, noting in a letter that, “He started life as a miner, but the only trace left is in his features, which are rough looking. His head is magnificent, his manners perfect, his conversation that of a scholar and a philosopher, his interest and knowledge vast and varied.”

Oh yes, Sime was ten years a miner before he took to drawing. As he was born in Manchester, he might very well have been down the same pit as my great-uncles. And then he fetched up in Worplesdon, just a short walk across the heath from where I grew up. And in the meantime he honed his craft at the Liverpool School of Art, which I believe is where Leo’s dad studied. It’s a small world on this, the mundane side of Sime’s canvas.

It’s hard to look at Sime’s pictures without getting pulled into an entire universe. He might show only a little house in the woods, but your imagination travels on beyond the woods and finds a castle, teeming with courtiers in outlandish robes, all bearing a succession of silver platters down to their imprisoned king in the dungeons. Or a herald on the battlements sending a dove aloft, carrying in its beak a secret message which will be passed from bird to bird and never again come down to earth where it might be read. Oh, the hours of fancy you get from one Sime image!

Dunsany must have thought so too; he would often weave an entire story around one of Sime’s pictures. If you are ever in Worplesdon, make your way to the cricket pavilion and see if you can find somebody to unlock the Sime Museum, which is a room on the upper floor. The village owns his works now – once the toast of the Café Royal crowd, now curling in dusty sunbeams. The old lady who kindly showed me round said, “We had some American gentlemen who wanted to turn Mr Sime’s drawings into a calendar, but we thought it would be a bother.”

Sime died very nearly that magic seventy years ago. The door to public domain opens. Will fame again be there to greet him?

"For heaven's sake shut that window!"

We certainly don't need much of an excuse to plug the brilliant and always enlightening comics blog Cloud 109. But this week it's essential reading for Mirabilis enthusiasts because Peter Richardson is running a complete Adèle Blanc-Sec story by Jacques Tardi. A pterodactyl terrorizes Edwardian Paris - you can see why that's right up our rue. There's the link - and if you're not familiar with Tardi's work, you're in for a real treat.

There's a Mirus Comics no-prize for the first person to identify who is being quoted in the heading of this post. Hint: John Rhys-Davies would be ideal casting.

Future shock

Verlyn Klinkenborg is perhaps the greatest stylist writing today, a man whose prose is so beautiful as to be simply astonishing. Last November I quoted his little prose poem on autumn, words so evocative that you can smell the smoky tang on the air, feel the damp chill as the sun sets early. It’s one of my favourite passages in the English language.

On other seasons, and the countryside, and our lives as part of one grand picture, he has no equal. But his thoughts on e-readers I found a little disappointing. These are just the sentiments that everybody else expresses:

“I have been reading a lot on my iPad recently, and I have some complaints — not about the iPad but about the state of digital reading generally. Reading is a subtle thing, and its subtleties are artifacts of a venerable medium: words printed in ink on paper. Glass and pixels aren’t the same.”

So many people are getting defensive about e-readers. It’s like a child screeching, "But I don't LIKE the new thing. I want the OLD thing." But nobody has said ebooks are here to do away with print books. They're an extra thing, a new variation, not a replacement. They surely will replace some books - disposable thrillers, for example, where all you're buying is the story. But for those who want a beautiful print edition of a fine book, you'll still be able to get those. No need to fret yet.

Ebooks will diverge from print books. They may complement the print edition. A book about great battles of the world could have interactive maps of the battlefield, for example. Clearly in many cases of nonfiction, the ebooks will be better.

Every reactionary opinion focuses only on how ebooks fail to do what print books do. But what about the things they do that traditional books don't? The ways they are better? Not crowding you out of house and home, for example! Any time a new technology comes along, it will do things differently from the technology that went before. That doesn't make it bad. Just different.

If you look at literary forums about e-readers, most comments focus on the negative. "Oh, but I like the fusty old smell of my books." "You can't give e-books as gifts." "What about reading in the bath/pool?" (Who the hell does?) "If I lose my e-reader I'm going to lose my entire library." (No you're not.) "I can't make notes in them." (Who said?) "But they just aren't as nice to fondle as my books... it's the end of the world... the barbarians are at the gates, wail, gnash."

Mr Klinkenborg is far better informed than that. But in his New York Times article he does express concern about not being able to lend ebooks, not being able to have libraries, and so on. To those who feel this way I would say, "Fer Chrissakes, the iBookstore has only been going a couple months! Give it a freakin' chance!" If people want to lend ebooks, that'll come. An online library where you get the book for a month? Sure, if enough people want it, you’ll get it. No need to look for things to gripe about.

And what about the good things that will come as a result of epublishing? More books will see the light of day, because publishers no longer need to be convinced that 1000 people will buy it in Chicago, 1500 in New York and so on. As long as an ebook justifies the cost of writing and illustration (largely undertaken at the authors' risk even now) it can be published. Online it will find its readers wherever they may be. Think of how often a book has failed because of the print medium. Good books been sent in the wrong quantities to the wrong places, then remaindered and pulped - not because there weren't readers out there for them, but because the print distribution system didn't get the book to the right places.

And then there's self-publishing. Peter Richardson on Cloud 109 has been discussing the problems of getting new ideas past the marketing people. Jon Higham’s Elly books have now appeared in the App Store and are doing very well. We hope to have Mirabilis in the App Store soon. This is a glorious dawn for authors. It might even turn out to be rather good for publishers too - at least those, like Nosy Crow, that are willing and able to evolve.

As for the reading experience on iPad... Well, comics and magazines are just better, no question. As for books, I am of that generation that loves the feel and aroma of books. My senses quicken as I enter a secondhand bookstore. But we're going to die out. No use crying about it, it's the USP of the human race: forever reshaping our relationship with the world around us. Future generations will find other things to love. It won't mean they're soulless or can't appreciate the beauty of a book, but they'll find that beauty in other ways. Heaven knows, they might even start to pay a little more attention to the text.

Mr Klinkenborg writes, as I say, beautifully. His insights have often brought my brain to a full stop as I rearrange my thinking in response. But comments like this on ebooks and e-readers are all too common among book lovers. They depress me because they seem to be drawing up lines for a war we don’t have to fight. There are few enough folks who read books in the world today. The barbarians aren't at the gates, they're plonked in front of network TV and texting their friends while listening to a greatest hits playlist at the same time. So let’s not have a schism between the print book cultists and the worshippers at the iShrine. Let's just support books in all of their forms.

"Due attention to the inside of books, and due contempt for the outside, is the proper relation between a man of sense and his library."
- Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

While there's music and moonlight

Not wanting to jinx it, but things are looking distinctly brighter for Mirabilis this weekend than they turned out to be for the Weinsteins and Miramax (see last post).

We have spent the last three months negotiating a release from the old DFC contract that will free up the Mirabilis rights. And at last that is looking like it’s about to happen, thanks to the heroic efforts of our agent Stephanie Thwaites and the personal intervention of Random House Children’s CEO Philippa Dickinson.

Getting back our rights will allow me, Leo, Nikos and Martin to complete the Winter book and get on with the rest of the series. We’ll also be able to go looking for publishers in various territories who really love Mirabilis and will want to get behind it. The size of the publisher isn’t all that important – it’s their passion and commitment we’ll be looking for. For example, look at comments by Tim Jones here and Alistair Spalding here that show their enthusiasm for Garen Ewing’s brilliant Rainbow Orchid series (next book out July 5th). Leo and I fantasize about finding Mirabilis a home like that.

You diehards won’t have to wait, though. We’ve got 200 pages almost complete and we plan to release those in a limited collector’s edition right away. We’re also iPad junkies, and you can expect to see a version in the App Store alongside Leo’s charming Sweet Pea series. (My wife thinks Sweet Pea looks like an infant Estelle. Close, except Estelle at five years old would probably be building a formicarium in her wardrobe instead of deciding what to wear!)

On top of that, what I’d really like is to get Mirabilis out in comic book form. Book One neatly slices into eight 25-page instalments. I’m not sure yet how Mirabilis: The Comic #1-#8 would dovetail with an iPad or print collector’s edition, much less what the eventual publisher would think about it. But a tiny part of the story was originally serialized in Random House’s weekly DFC comic two years ago, and that didn’t hurt – in fact, netted us several thousand blog hits.

And you know I mocked up those “Mirus Comics” covers a while back? Those might soon be a reality. My ten-year-old self is going to be ecstatic.

Max pain

Two guys who created a property that we'll just call Mira--- have been trying to get back control of it. Sadly their offer was turned down and now negotiations are back in the corporate glue from which nothing escapes. Our hearts go out to the Weinstein bothers and you can read the full story here. Don't ever let 'em grind you down, boys.