Long (Frank Belknap) The Hounds of Tindalos

Cloth a little bumped, but overall VG; jacket a little rubbed and frayed but overall VG.

Jacket artwork possibly by Mervyn Peake [unattributed]

Wonderfully ghoulish jacket artwork considered by many over the years to be the work of Mervyn Peake, not least for its similarity to an illustration of his for Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (Chatto & Windus, 1943).

The publishers and the artist decided not to use this image, agreeing it was too strongly macabre, and the illustration, entitled ‘Life-in-Death’, was not used with the text until 1978. However, it did appear in Poetry London X (1944), and was reproduced in one of the contemporary issues of Designers in Britain.

In ‘Mervyn Peake: A pupil remembers’, John Wood recalls ”A reckless commercial artist made a shameless plagiarism of [‘Life-in-Death’] for a dustwrapper of The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long, published by the Museum Press in 1950”  (Mervyn Peak Review, no 12, Spring 1981,15-28).

However, during research for a special edition set of Peake’s illustrated works, the Queen Anne Press were advised that Peake had also provided the jacket artwork for The Hounds of Tindalos, on commission, which does seem plausible given that the original illustration had already been published, and he would not have assumed it would be used for the Coleridge edition down the line. The money for the commission would perhaps also have been useful, but that is pure conjecture!

Either way, a wonderful example of jacket artwork, adorning a great selection of short stories by well-known author Belknap Long, comprising sci-fi elements, Lovecraftian influences, nautical horror, Egyptian tomb terror, “yellow peril”, swamp things and more.