BookCat

Announcement for #BookologyThursday -BookCat is out for some minor surgery and hopes to return next Thursday. Thank you, and apologies💛

A maiden transforms into a swan. Painting by Annie Stegg.

In Norse mythology, valkyries would take vacations from their duties by putting on magic cloaks of swan feathers, and flying around the Earth as swans. They would alight in hidden pools, take on human form to bathe, and punish any mortals who saw them there.
🎨Annie Stegg
#FairyTaleTuesday

Charles Keeping's illustration for 'The Foghorn' by Ray Bradbury.
#RayBradbury #Bradbury #CharlesKeeping #sci-fi #scifi #sciencefiction #monster #dinosaur

Illustration by Edwin Austin Abbey, 1879 The Eve of St. Agnes: "They glide like phantoms, into the wide hall" Ink wash and Chinese white on cream paper. A young couple, a man and a woman in medieval garb, descend a flight of stairs. They are met with a hound and a body of an elderly man.

They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;
Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide;
…
And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.

John Keats, 'The Eve of St. Agnes' 1819

#booksky #poetry #romanticism

Surreal, sepia-toned scene of masked, pale-faced figures in long black robes moving across a barren landscape. One rides a strange tricycle-like cart, another carries a tall staff topped with a bat-winged parasol, and a hunched figure trails behind; a leafless tree and a dark sun hang over the horizon, giving the procession an eerie, ritual feel.

“Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow”

(T.S. Eliot)

🎨 Marc Potts

A red torii (gate) spears to be floating on water. It is mowing and snow is sitting on the torii and on the rooftops of houses on the shore. There are mountains in the background. A person in a small boat moves through the water in front of the torii.

'Snow at Miyajima' - Kawase Hasui, 1928.
#ToriiTuesday #shinhanga #JapaneseArt

John Everett Millais "St Agnes Eve" (1855) - Delicate black-and-white drawing of a young woman standing on a stone step at an arched window, seen in profile and from behind. Wrapped in a long nightgown, she holds a candle and gazes out at a snowy village of steep roofs and bare trees, the cold winter scene framed by the dark interior of the window recess.

“St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!”, John Keats wrote in 1819 and since today is the day, we take a look at the divinations made by unwed girls on that liminal date and, like the poet, feel the past creep up on us, in our 14th #winterfolklore tale. Quite literally.

Read it below!

🎨 Millais

Dear #booksky #poetry people who know about such things, I would like to read Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, but because I am stupid and only know English I have to read it in translation. Is there a recommended one or are they all much the same?

#bookchatweekly

Announcement for #BookologyThursday -BookCat is out for some minor surgery and hopes to return next Thursday. Thank you, and apologies💛

a curled up fox facing forward and angled slightly to the right. Behind the fox a crescent moon, in front of the fox the crescent moon reflected in a pool of water. Linocut, shades of lightspeckled orange, dark blue and white. Maria Strutz

In celebration of today's New Moon
A fox curled up and dreaming of the moon 🦊🌑🌿
#NewMoon #FoxMoon #FoxoftheDay

'Hamlet' by Gustave Mossa. Yorick clearly had more than a big personality.
#ShakespeareSunday #Shakespeare #booksky #weirdart #artksy

Bold, graphic illustration on a red background of a black, siren-like sea creature rising from foaming waves. It has a long pale mane and an open, toothy mouth framed by a radiating halo of lines, while curling tentacles and stylised white wave crests swirl around its body in a textured, poster-like style.

“Here Scylla bellows from the dire abodes,
Tremendous pest, abhorr’d by man and gods!”

(Homer, “The Odyssey”, trl. Alexander Pope)

🎨 @mgzd42

The Korrigan are the Little People of Brittany. Anger them and you might be in for a very, very long winter stroll.

Our 12th #winterfolklore story is another cautionary tale, this time from the famed Forest of Brocéliande – read it below. At your own peril.

🎨 Serge Lassus

A small child in Breton dress sits on an enormous flat stone. The words read: '2383 - Les Alignements du Menec - La Pierre resonnante'. The postcard is published by Rennes and is numbered by them 134. This is one of several postcards of Carnac I picked up in a second-hand shop in North Wales of all places.

An old postcard of one of the gigantic 'resonant' stones of the Menec complex at #Carnac. This looks like a huge recumbent to me, but I'm sure at least one of you will know whether it's actually a fallen menhir. I guess Pierre refers to St Peter 'the Rock'.
#StandingStoneSunday #Neolithic

One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

~C.S. Lewis
🎨 Thomas Cooper Gotch (1904)

Good day, dear Bibliophiles✨

🎨Franklin Booth (1874-1948)

Good day, dear Bibliophiles✨

🎨Franklin Booth (1874-1948)

Happy #WinnieThePoohDay 🎈

Time for a delicious smackerel from my vintage Pooh Cook Book to celebrate author A. A. Milne’s birthday #OTD (1882)

#BookChatWeekly

A mournful Heathcliff gazes at the sky. Woodcut by Fritz Eichenberg, in his series of "Wuthering Heights" illustrations.

"The day she was buried..., I said to myself - 'I'll have her in my arms again! If she be cold, I'll think it is this north wind that chills ME, and if she be motionless, it is sleep.'"
- Emily Brontë, "Wuthering Heights"

🎨Fritz Eichenberg
#BookWormSat #BookChatWeekly

Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion.

Jane Austen
#BookWormSat
#BookChatWeekly

Frankenstein's Creature crying in Guillermo del Toro's "Frankenstein."

"I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? ... Shall I respect man when he condemns me?"
- Mary Shelley, "Frankenstein"
#BookWormSat

#bookwormsat
WUTHERING HEIGHTS💘
Heathcliff: "And I pray one prayer I repent it till my tongue stiffens, Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living, you said I killed you- haunt me then.."
Emily Bronte #bookchatweekly #gothic

Lithograph: M.C. Escher, Waterfall. A strange building with water flowing up angled channels to a waterfall in a circulating system.

"It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon."

HP Lovecraft, 'The Call of Cthulhu'
#amreading #shortstories
#bookchatweekly

The Bronte Parsonage by Su Blackwell. A paper #sculpture created from an old copy of Jane Eyre. (Via Maude Frome)

#BookChatWeekly #BookologyThursday #FolkloreSunday #Yorkshire #Victorian #literature

Fairyland by Edmund Dulac by forgottenbeauty | Redbubble This illustration was done for the Edgar Allan Poe poem.

1/2 The Haunted Palace -#EdgarAllanPoe
"And travellers, now, within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody; redbubble.com/shop/ap/3327... #PhantomsFriday #illustration #art #poem #homedecor #bookchatweekly #literature

The Black Lady of Bradley Woods is a ghost which reportedly haunts the woods near the village of Bradley, Lincolnshire. She's dressed in a flowing black cloak and a black hood that covers her hair but reveals her mournful, pale, tear-soaked face.

#phantomsfriday

A man, perhaps a tramp, sits among ruins, his head in his hands. A spectral figure leans against his back, its hand reaching behind. There may be a hint of cruelty on its half-formed face.

'Meeting With A Spirit' by Jaroslav Panuska.
#PhantomsFriday #artsky #ghost

Good day, dear Bibliophiles✨

art by Arantza Sestayo

An etching of a woman with a dog descending down the stairs. She holds out her candle to see the old armour of knights and horses downstairs.

'The Haunted Armoury'

#illustration by Percy Macquoid 1881 #PhantomsFriday

Very proud to see our authors at @starsandsabers.bsky.social getting this recognition! Congrats to @cornellwriter.bsky.social!