Product Description

Genuine weirdness is a rare quality. To be truly weird demands character and wanton disregard for the social mores of the day.

Unleashed in Tales of the Weirrd is Ralph Steadman's fantastic interpretations and biographies of nineteenth century grotesques, oddities, imposters and eccentrics. The book is a hilarious catalog of nature's freakish humor and, in the best Victorian tradition, it instructs as well as entertains. This crazy collection of dwarfs, and gluttons, wits and water-spouters includes:
- Charles Charlesworth, who grew a beard at age four and died of old age at the age of seven
- Old Boots, who could hold a piece of money between his nose and chin
- Barbara Urselin, the hairy-faced woman
- Henry Lemoine, an eccentric bookseller
- Guillaume de Nittis, who tried to eat himself
- Fakir Agastiya, who kept his arm in the air for ten years
- Neville Vadio, the blind caricaturist, who was claimed by many to be a better draughtsman than Rembrandt.

Tales of the Weirrd is an extraordinary celebration of the bizarre brought to life by the astonishing energy, imagination and power of Ralph Steadman's pen.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #215100 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

About the Author
Ralph Steadman's illustrations have appearing in newspapers, magazines and dozens of books including Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Animal Farm, Alice in Wonderland and Sigmund Freud. He recently traveled the world's vineyards and distilleries for Oddbins, which culminated in his two prize-winning books, The Grapes of Ralph and Still Life With Bottle. He has an Honorary D. Litt from the University of Kent. He has won numerous awards including the W.H. Smith Illustration Award and was named Illustrator of the Year by the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 1979.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Genuine Weirdness is a rare quality. To be truly weird demands character and a wanton disregard for the social mores of the day.

Strangely, it is not in the past century that the truly weird have emerged, even though we have witnessed mind-warping changes and can expect many more in the new millennium. The changes we have witnessed have not come about to make us all different, to help us find ourselves and realize our own identities. On the contrary, it seems that the essence of movement and change in the past century has had more to do with the control of difference, the standardization of mankind to satisfy a universal desire for sameness. Twentieth-century political ideologies have sought only to free us from one tyranny, and impose another more ruthless and more regulated tyranny upon us whose methods raze differences to the ground. The abnormal is treated with a general social disgust, as though human dignity had more to do with "neat front lawns" than the spirit and courage within our troubled minds.

Today, ideologies are structures into which people are systematically packed. Traditionally, ideologies were considered to be ideals fired with reason, rationalizing the best in us, the finest, our greatest hopes and aspirations. The Renaissance kindled the rebirth of Humanism through the arts and philosophic reflection, and stands as an example, a yardstick which still commands respect.

Ideologies of the twentieth century are nineteenth-century social dreams gone wrong, re-structured into practical systems to deny the individual. They have been exposed as euphemisms hiding terrifying crimes -- the purging of millions of lives in the name of common goals -- lowest common denominators masquerading as brave new worlds, the last refuge of a Utopian sleaze.

Though eccentricity was rife, the Victorians were not without blame in their denial of self and the individual. The respectable, the noble and the regal hid the shame of abnormality behind locked doors in remote rooms, treating such blighted wretches far worse that animals, as though a congenital defect was a curse to be vilified, along with its carrier, and not a human being with feelings to be nurtured and cared for.

Perhaps those who escaped such treatment due to circumstances of birth within a socially inferior section of society were luckier, for the afflicted could be displayed proudly as prized sideshow specimens for which money could be charged, even fortunes made. There was, after all, human contact and in many cases an admiration and sense of awe at the weirdness displayed before a credulous public. Some inbred mutants lived lives of luxury as court favourites, using their charm and their guile to win hearts and be accepted on equal terms, or at least as engaging novelties, which gave them some kind of decent life.

In our time, these physical and mental abnormalities are viewed with an awkward repugnance and an embarrassment, for we can neither display such things for profit, shut them away in towers, nor live comfortably with them side by side in a streamlined society which prizes the ordinary, the conventional and the unobtrusive. We have civilized ourselves to be decent and law-abiding and uncompassionate. We are not caring for the growing numbers of "normal inadequates" who cannot absorb the stresses of our highly developed and bureaucratic lifestyle. What chance for a being who is truly weird? If all mankind were weird maybe the normal would look strange.

In 1969 I happened upon a book published in 1869 by Reeves and Turner, 196 Strand, London. It is a collection of Wonderful Characters written about by Henry Wilson and James Caulfield. For twenty years I have considered it a book to be re-made and the characters portrayed as they might have been. Gradually, the revised collection emerged and recently I finished it and decided to use the same enchanting text which is so steeped in the turn of phrase of mid-Victorian England. I could do no better, but I have included other weird and wonderful characters found elsewhere. I have given my own account of their lives. The subjects are to be found in several books, but in that context more as a collection of sideshow curiosities from the Guinness Book of Records or Ripley's Believe It or Not.

This is a book of characters who inspired drawings I could not have imagined without the proof of their one-time existence.

I resisted including twentieth-century characters. With a few exceptions, people of a genuinely unusual appearance ceased to exist professionally with the passing of silent movies, crowned by Tod Browning's 1933 masterpiece, Freaks. Today, weirdness is recreated in special-effects workshops tailor-made to suit a film, sometimes ingenious, sometimes pathetic but, weirdly, always in demand.

With the passage of time between us and the truly weird of long ago we can allow a certain fantasy to surround these special beings. Maybe the facts have been changed or embellished with the telling, which is the essence of a good story anyway. We can treat them as fairy tales. It also allows me to view them objectively without remorse, and with candour and sometimes burnout. Look upon my effort as a graphic reincarnation of their kind viewed from a place in history where people have cancelled out the prospect that difference can be cultivated and regarded as a virtue.

Customer Reviews

Must Have!
Along with Steadman's unique and inspiring art, this book explores the land of the weirrd....humans who once entertained the boring people with their bizarre and unusual oddities. With each tale of a sideshow star, Steadman draws us a picture and weaves an eloquent and highly entertaining story about his subject. Steadman is literate as all hell. When you're done with this be sure to check out his latest...DOODAA - a triography. No doubt this man has a bundle of fun with himself - his mind is a treasure chest of wacky good times and he seems to have a great grasp on our human reality - every inch of dystopic madness. With books like this, Steadman does his part, in keeping the rest of us sane and amused.

Poor layout greatly harms this book.
The stories in this book are fun documentations of abnormal individuals.

The illustrations are as dynamic and charming as you'd expect from Mr. Steadman.

It can be very hard to enjoy them, however, as the publisher has taken all of the best illustrations and buried them in the spine of the book crossing the page breaks. What the hell were they thinking?! You can tell there's a great drawing there, but you can't even see most of it without mangling the book. This is true on page after page.

Somebody who really doesn't care put this thing together slap-dashedly. It's a shame. It makes the whole thing not worthwhile.

Bizarre Art + Bizarre Tales = Excellent Book
This book is not just a worthy purchase because of the Steadman artwork. The short stories and accounts of the faboulously odd fellows and delightfully abnormal ladies would make this book a definite keeper even if there were no pictures. But add the refreshingly unique artwork to the equally interesting tales and you have a book that you'll pull off the shelf more than once. I also like that this book is somewhat oversized, which means the reader can appreciate the artwork on a more grand scale. Also, if you don't have the time or the energy to read a book from front to back in one sitting, this is an ideal book for you because it is full of short stories that you could walk away from for months and come right back to without having to remember a thing.