PULP REDUX: The Fantastic Art of Robert H. Knox Slipcase Edition Chiroptera Press

Chiroptera Press proudly presents PULP REDUX: The Fantastic Art of Robert H. Knox. This long-needed debut collection spans over five decades of weird illustration by Knox, beginning with the initial portfolio, long out-of-print, that established his reputation as an unmistakable visionary of the outré, H.P. Lovecraft: Illustrated in Ichor.  Scenes of elder gods and lurking horrors are made even more weird by the artist’s detailed ruled and cross-hatched technique. Other early work includes his many contributions to Midnight Marquee magazine, in which he continued to hone his stylistic pen-and-ink technique on depictions of beloved Universal monsters and creatures from B movies. Yet it is his career illustrating the Weird Tales circle that has made Knox’s work so uniquely recognizable and highly esteemed in the weird fiction community, specifically his illustrations for Necronomicon Press. Along with providing covers to every issue of S.T. Joshi’s academic journal Studies in Weird Fiction, Knox contributed mesmerizing cover art for a series of Clark Ashton Smith chapbooks and projects that collected letters by Smith and Robert E. Howard, as well as critical studies of Fritz Leiber and Ramsey Campbell. As Lovecraftian readers grew in number, Necronomicon Press commissioned Knox for covers to new titles that featured original mythos fiction, such as Cthulhu Codex and Midnight Shambler. And then, of course, there are the stunning Robert H. Knox covers for Crypt of Cthulhu, which are as beautiful as they are bizarre.

PULP REDUX also reproduces a selection of Knox’s painted work in full-color, which includes covers for Hippocampus Press. Furthermore, throughout these pages are many unpublished works that will see print for the first time. Every image has been meticulously selected, scanned, and restored by the artist himself. PULP REDUX: The Fantastic Art of Robert H. Knox is 270 pages of art that every collector of Lovecraftian horror and the weird has wanted for years! “This retrospective is long overdue,” writes S.T. Joshi in the book’s introduction, “for it will place [Knox] in the gallery of weird artists stretching back to John Martin, Gustave Dore, Harry Clarke, S.H. Sime, and so many others, down to our own day with figures as Jason C. Eckhardt, Bob Eggleton, David Ho, and J.K. Potter. The imaginative range that Bob has demonstrated over a lifetime is second to none, and each piece he generates lodges in our minds as the expression of an utterly unique vision of terror and strangeness.”