Tuesday, July 7, 2009

"Der Orchideengarten," 1919-1921






The always wonderful blog "A Journey Around my Skull" has just posted a fascinating story about a short-lived German fantasy pulp magazine called Der Orchideengarten. Around for only 3 years (from 1919 to 1921) and spanning 51 issues, the magazine (to quote from the post, which quotes Franz Rottensteiner's TheFantasy Book: An Illustrated History From Dracula To Tolkien):
...featured an impressive gallery of fantastic art, ranging from reproductions of medieval woodcuts, and the work of established masters of macabre drawing like Gustave Dore or Tony Johannot, to contemporary German artists like Rolf von Hoerschelmann, Otto Linnekogel, Karl Ritter, Heinrich Kley, or Alfred Kubin.... the magazine also printed a wide selection of fantastic stories by famous foreign authors such as Dickens, Pushkin, Charles Nodier, Maupassant, Poe, Voltaire, Gautier, Washington Irving, Hawthorne, Valerii Briusov, H. G. Wells, Karel and Josef Capek, Victor Hugo, and others equally prominent....
The wonderful cover illustrations for the magazine--three of which you can see above; click images to see much larger versions--are noteworthy for a disquieting blend of Jugendstil elegance and a macabre decadence. You can see more of these fantastic magazine covers--and read the full post--by clicking here.

2 comments:

Julia Solis said...

Wow! Thanks for sharing this!

Danny said...

cool blog:)