Illustrations by Sam Weber

Monster | Pillar of Salt | Blood | Honey

A little unscheduled hiatus; I've seen a little too much of the inside of A&E recently! I'm back, now minus my crutches and codeine, and luckily the majority of the mystery pain in my foot. Whilst hobbling about in South Kensington preparing for CreateVoice's event at the Victoria and Albert Museum (more on that on our blog) I ventured into the South Kensington Independent Bookshop. I was very happy to see an entire set of bookshelves devoted to the Folio Society, and might have also bought a book from it despite the price. What can I say, there wasn't a standard copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but there was a beautifully illustrated hardback copy in the Folio section... I think that means something. Looking through all of the titles available I was hard pressed not to spend a lot more than I did, but I escaped with most of my student loan intact and instead visited the website. Searching through a few of my favourite covers, I came across Sam Weber, who provided illustration for the Folio Society's William Golding's Lord of the Flies and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. 

Weber's style is classically beautiful, brilliantly painterly - despite often being finished digitally - yet retain a strangely unsettling edge. Many of his illustrations are for disquieting stories full of dystopian ideas; societal chaos in Lord of the Flies, the burning of books in Fahrenheit 451, scientists meddling with human and artificial life in The Rotten Beast (read the short story here), and North America's obsession with the Apocalypse. There's so many interesting ideas and projects on his website, and I've got a few new books and articles on the reading list now, particularly a collection of Russian folk tales for adults by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.