"HEART OF DARKNESS" ENDPAPERS

I love beautiful books, and I love when attention is lavished upon the design of a book. One of the ways this attention manifests itself is in endpapers, which at one time were quite common but have sadly disappeared almost entirely. I was thrilled when my fine publisher Tin House Books contacted me about creating hand-drawn endpapers for my upcoming illustrated edition of Heart of Darkness. One visual element which was a constant thread running through many of my illustrations was the African jungle. Or, rather, the idea of the African jungle, abstracted to the point of being a single, massive wall of vegetation. That was my earliest impression of Heart of Darkness, from my first reading many years ago, and it is an image and an idea I keep returning to every time I make the journey through the story again. For these endpapers, I was fascinated by the idea of them literally enclosing and containing the book, and that visual of a massive wall of impenetrable, forbidding green jungle was the only option. At the last moment, I decided to include a small image of Marlow in the lower right corner since this is in so many ways his story. Right now, I am not yet sure if Tin House will include that image of Marlow or if the drawing will be cropped and slightly enlarged to show the leaves only. Either way I will be pleased, and I am absolutely thrilled that this next book of mine is shaping up to be every bit as beautiful an object as my Moby-Dick in Pictures was.

Here is my drawing for the endpapers...

HEART OF DARKNESS, page 038

Title: "One evening as I was lying flat on the deck of my steamboat, I heard voices approaching -- and there were the nephew and the uncle strolling along the bank. I laid my head on my arm again, and had nearly lost myself in a doze, when somebody said in my ear, as it were: 'I am as harmless as a little child, but I don't like to be dictated to. Am I the manager -- or am I not? I was ordered to send him there. It's incredible.'...I became aware that the two were standing on the shore alongside the forepart of the steamboat, just below my head. I did not move; it did not occur to me to move: I was sleepy."

6.75 inches by 11 inches
ink on watercolor paper
October 21, 2012

HEART OF DARKNESS, page 034

Title: "What I really wanted was rivets, by heaven! Rivets. To get on with the work -- to stop the hole. Rivets I wanted. There were cases of them down at the coast -- cases -- piled up -- burst -- split! You kicked a loose rivet at every second step in that station-yard on the hillside. Rivets had rolled into the grove of death. You could fill your pockets with rivets for the trouble of stooping down -- and there wasn't one rivet to be found where it was wanted."

6.75 inches by 11 inches
ink and marker on watercolor paper
October 14, 2012

HEART OF DARKNESS, page 033

Title: "We live, as we dream -- alone..."

6.75 inches by 11 inches
ink on watercolor paper
October 13, 2012

HEART OF DARKNESS, page 032

Title: "I had my shoulders against the wreck of my steamer, hauled up on the slope like a carcass of some big river animal. The smell of mud, of primeval mud, by Jove! was in my nostrils, the high stillness of primeval forest was before my eyes; there were shiny patches on the black creek. The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver -- over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur."

6.75 inches by 11 inches
ink and marker on watercolor paper
October 13, 2012

HEART OF DARKNESS, page 013

(This illustration is also known as The Joe Kuth Memorial Barbecue.)

Title: "Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle."

6.75 inches by 11 inches
ink and marker on watercolor paper
September 11, 2012

HEART OF DARKNESS, page 012

Title: "...and then with a certain eagerness asked me whether I would let him measure my head."

6.75 inches by 11 inches
ink and marker on watercolor paper
September 10, 2012

HEART OF DARKNESS, page 010

Title: "...on one end a large shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red -- good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn't going into any of these. I was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre. And the river was there -- fascinating -- deadly -- like a snake."

6.75 inches by 11 inches
ink and marker on watercolor paper
September 3, 2012

HEART OF DARKNESS, page 009

Title: "In a very few hours I arrived in a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre."

6.75 inches by 11 inches
ink on watercolor paper
September 2, 2012

HEART OF DARKNESS, page 004

Title: But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

6.75 inches by 11 inches
ink on watercolor paper
August 26, 2012

HEART OF DARKNESS, page 003

Title: "And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."

6.75 inches by 11 inches
ink on watercolor paper
August 25, 2012

HEART OF DARKNESS, page 002

Title: Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an idol.

6.75 inches by 11 inches
ink on watercolor paper
August 25, 2012

HEART OF DARKNESS, page 001

Let's try this again, shall we? And this time, everything worked out just fine, so these next 100 illustrations will definitely be in the upcoming book from Tin House.

Title: A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless...

6.75 inches by 11 inches
ink on watercolor paper
August 25, 2012