Tales of the Weird cover gallery
The titles are listed chronologically and grouped by year, with brief notes for each batch. All images were briefed and commissioned by me, with Mauricio Villamayor designing in collaboration with a range of illustrators. All final covers copyright The British Library. If you’re looking to purchase any of these books, I recommended starting at the Library’s own shop page, where your purchase helps fund the vital work of the institution.
2018
The beginning. Two anthologies of lost tales edited by Mike Ashley (From the Depths and Glimpses of the Unknown) join two macabre collections edited by British Library curators (Mortal Echoes and Spirits of the Seasons) and a pair of novellas by Charlotte Riddell introduced by Andrew Smith. I create the brief for designer Mauricio Villamayor and we work on a style drawing on engraving to represent the vintage origins of many of the stories which appear in the books, offset with vibrant colours against voidlike backgrounds. The illustrations are by Mauricio’s collaborator Enrique Bernardou, who also provides frontispieces for Mortal Echoes and Spirits of the Season. The other frontispieces are sourced from the Library’s vast image collections.
2019
We get to do more? A positive reception from the book trade helps greenlight four more titles per publishing season (spring and autumn) for 2019, including two more themed anthologies from Mike Ashley and three books edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes. The previously published collection The Face in the Glass is given the Tales of the Weird cover treatment. Surprise submissions from academics Daisy Butcher (Evil Roots) and John Miller (Tales of the Tattooed) strike a chord and become popular entries in the series. All illustrations by Enrique Bernardou again, aside from Tales of the Tattooed, for which we commissioned editor John Miller’s own tattoo artist Luca Ortis to illustrate the Jun’ichirō Tanizaki story ‘The Tattooer’. Later, when we were publishing John’s follow-up book in a different British Library series, The Philosophy of Tattoos, I discovered later that Luca lived on the same street as me in London.
2020
Weird from home. Only six titles this year due to disruption from the Pandemic. Work continued full time (from home) for the publishing team but publication dates were adjusted due to uncertainty about how printers and other parts of the publishing pipeline would react to the wild events of the year. Elizabeth Dearnley works on her first anthology for the series, and Mike supplies another three. British Library curator Tanya Kirk provides more Christmas frights and John Miller edits what became one of the evergreen strong sellers for the series, Weird Woods. For this cover, Mauricio drew on Paraguayan mythology of the tree/shadow spirit malavisión to illustrate the hauntingly humanoid tree figure in the foreground. Enrique Bernardou provides his final series cover for Into the London Fog. For the rest of this year’s titles, Mauricio suggests asking illustrator Sandra Gómez to bring her skills to the series. I’m keen to see how her style translates, and she delivers some classics, with my highlight being not one, but two, enticingly strange options for the culty hand-crown brief I sent for Queens of the Abyss. The second option adds to the list of wonderful bespoke frontispieces.
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
