The Book of Magic: cover and... Cthulhu

The Bumper Book of Magic cover. Art by J. Coulthart.

I am currently trying to write a series of articles, diving into The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic section by section. They are serialized on the Italian web-magazine (Quasi) and so far two episodes are available (more to come, I hope. Don't hold your breath!) In Italian, of course.

 

In writing the pieces I also contacted some of the contributors to get, if possible, behind the scene info or extra bits of magic to include in.

In the following you can read what the great John Coulthart revealed about the cover, the magical alphabet and... Cthulhu. 

Special thanks to Coulthart for his time and kindness. Grazie mille!

John you created real magic for the book! And grazie ancora for the permission to share your original answers on this blog!

I highly recommend to visit Coulthart's official site and to follow his amazing { feuilleton } entries!

John Coulthart: The cover evolved from a request from Alan for something with the following elements:
a) the stylistic appearance of an old children's book (or "annual" as they're known here).
b) a central image showing a boy from the first half of the 20th-century holding a Tarot card in one hand and a wand in the other.
c) The title and names of the authors.

A very simple request compared to some of the covers I'm asked to create. The main task was finding a suitable figure for the central image. I could have drawn something myself but old illustrations have a unique quality, they always bring something of their own time into the present day. The boy was taken from a larger illustration on the cover of an American magazine of the 1930s. The first draft of this which I created in 2007 wasn't very successful compared to the version which appears on the printed cover. At the time I could only find a very small image of the original illustration--in 2007 there were fewer archive sources available--so I had to enlarge a small jpeg then paint over it using the mouse. It never looked bad but I was never wholly satisfied with the result. When I started work on the final layout in 2021 one of the first things I did was find a better copy of the cover boy. The image still required doctoring but this was easier to do with a larger picture and the drawing tablet which I now use every day. You'll notice that the final version has more definition than the earlier one, also the badge which I added to the artwork to make the difference between the old and new versions more evident. Everything else about the cover--the stars, the border (which features tiny moons and snakes)--was my own design.

Old version of The Bumper Book of Magic cover. Art by J. Coulthart.

    A note about "annuals". An annual for British readers was (and still is) a book published once a year, usually a large-format volume with a hard cover which would appear shortly before the Christmas season. 100 years ago children's annuals were often expensive productions but by the 1950s they tended to be printed on cheap paper and the contents weren't always very good. Even though The Bumper Book is for adults only, the intention was to create something that would look like the best annual a child could possibly receive as a Christmas gift.   

The alphabet was one of the first Moon and Serpent creations to emerge from Alan and Steve's magical explorations in the 1990s. I'm not sure when they put it together but some time in the late-1990s Alan sent me a computer print-out which showed in a rather crude form the layout of the letters as they are in the page, a grid with coloured letterforms and all their attributions. I'd already been playing around with fonts when I was asked to design the CD package for The Highbury Working so I scanned the shapes of the letters from Alan's pages then made them into a workable font which I used on the Moon and Serpent CDs and their accompanying posters.

The alphabet page was the first addition of my own to the book as a whole, this wasn't something listed in the original contents. I wanted to include it because it explained (at last) the alphabet I'd been using on all the Moon and Serpent CDs. I was always impressed with the alphabet which is why I was so eager to incorporate into the book. As well as being an early product of the Moon and Serpent project it's a clever condensation of a wide range of mythological and occult symbolism into 24 letters. It also looks like nothing but itself--it's not trying to emulate the appearance of older magical alphabets--and it really does work as an alphabet. Despite the unusual shapes of some of the letters the whole thing is relatively easy to read. Grimoires of the past (eg: Francis Barrett's The Magus) often contained pages of magical alphabets so this follows the tradition form while also adding something new to the idea of the magical alphabet. 

Art by J. Coulthart.

   Regarding Cthulhu, if you look at the attributions you'll notice that there are 12 male symbols and 12 female ones, so Cthulhu has been given a female assignation. I don't think terrestrial sex or gender designations can be applied to Cthulhu which is more of an "it" than anything else, and in the original Lovecraft story turns out to have a mutable form. Characters in the Cthulhu Mythos refer to Cthulhu as "he" but this seems more of a convenience or tradition than anything else. As for the letter, the utterance of Cthulhu's name isn't too far from the sound of "Q", while the attribution to Daath is part of Alan's theory that Daath is a kind of Lovecraftian abyss, something you see in the Magical Landscapes section of the book as well as in issue 20 of Promethea.