The Soul, Tarot and an iridescent perspex box

The eleventh episode in my ongoing series of articles about The Bumper Book has been posted on the Italian web-magazine (Quasi) today.

It's a new chat with the great John Coulthart about The Soul, Tarot and special editions! Enjoy! And... Grazie mille, John, for your generosity!

The Soul chapter 3, the sexual ritual episode. Was it a difficult chapter to illustrate?
John Coulthart: No more so than any of the other chapters.
 

What's about your decision, apart for the opening illustration, to draw small, vaporous, sketchy illustrations inscribed into a circle? Was it a way to communicate a sense of intimacy to the reader? I am curious also about the crescent moon and triangles dynamic included on the upper part of the pages.
I wanted to vary the style and layout of each chapter a little in order to create variety and also parallel in a small way Adeline's magical progress. The setting of Alban's studio suggested a sketchier drawing style while also avoiding the illustrations being too explicit. I've no qualms about doing sexually explicit artwork but such a thing wouldn't have been right for this particular book.
None of the documents for the Soul story gave any indication as to how the chapters should be illustrated so the symbols at the tops of the pages are my own addition, something to once again indicate the magical dimension as well as the different characters. The intersection of the triangles of Water and Fire are referred to in the text so I developed this into iconic representations of Adeline and Alban's sexual encounter. Adeline's inner life is represented by the Moon; the Water triangle is her external life. At the end of the chapter the two haven been joined, something made possible after the earlier conjunction of inner elements (Sun and Moon) and outer elements (Water and Fire).

In chapter 4 you are back to a more classic illustration approach. I can also feel a bit of Finlay vibes in the full page Moon palace illustration, even if it's in colour. Can you talk a bit about this fourth section?
The most novel element in chapter 4 was the border which was adapted from a versatile Viennese artist and designer, Koloman Moser. The border is another element from the Art Nouveau period but it's an unusual design that's sufficiently abstract to lend itself to different interpretations. The elaborate border also compensates for there being fewer illustrations in this chapter. I didn't want to extend the page count needlessly but I did want to have that full-page picture of the Moon palace. I wasn't thinking of Virgil Finlay's style but the drawing is certainly the closest one in the book to typical fantasy illustration. 

 

What's about the simplified Tarot deck that you designed? Originally, if I remember right, there were plans for an actual brand new Tarot deck to be included in the book or as a separate item...
Yes, José Villarrubia was going to be doing a complete Tarot design for the book when it was first announced in 2007. I think one of the ideas was to have the cards printed in such a way that they could be detached from the book and used as an actual deck of cards. In addition to spoiling the book the production costs would have escalated if this was the plan since the cards would have to be printed on heavier stock then perforated around their edges. As it turns out, Alan and Steve subsequently decided that inventing an entire deck of cards with 78 unique pictorial designs is a major task in itself, especially if you want to try and add anything to the vast corpus of imagery that already exists in the history of the Tarot. Alan later said to me that he didn't really think the Crowley/Harris deck could be easily improved upon, not unless you spent years working on the new designs to the exclusion of everything else. 

All of this left me with a problem when I came to design the book. The removal of the cards cut down the page-count considerably yet we still had an essay about the Tarot which needed to illustrated. After considering a couple of options such as trying to licence cards whose designs are still in copyright I decided to use two decks simultaneously: one of them very old and the other--my own designs--very new. This had a number of advantages: in addition to showing how the Tarot iconography can work in different ways the designs show the two main arrangements of the Major Arcana, one with the older, Christian icons like The Last Judgment, the other with the Crowley arrangement which updates some of the cards. The Marseille cards, incidentally, were coloured by myself from an old set of black-and-white prints.

Expanding this idea of separate items... well, sure the book is fantastic.. it's a real, amazing, colourful grimoire with that British flavour of old children annuals... but I was daydreaming about a version of the Bumper Book as... a Magic Box full of books, printed objects of different format and design. Maybe the complete The Soul story as a single small hardcover book with a Victorian cover and all your illos... the Alexander comics as a comics newspaper... the enchanters as a single french format comic album... and so on... a bit like Ware's Building Stories... What do you think about it? Was there ever a time, a preliminary brainstorming moment, when you considered a different format/package for the Bumper Book? 

I did make a jokey comment to the publishers about a future special edition in an iridescent perspex box with ceremonial robes and so on. Even though I like special editions and unusual packages I think I prefer the book being the way it is, especially when it was designed to be read as a single work. Adeline's magical evolution takes place while you're reading about the evolution of magical practice through the ages, and also being offered tips to your own practice in the Rainy Day chapters. The book ends with a recapitulation and summary of the contents which then describes the magical evolution of the authors. To borrow a favourite reference point of Alan's, it's like the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album: you can extract individual songs but the songs themselves work much better in an album format with a definite beginning, middle and end.