CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/10/2013

Marian Bantjes: Pretty Pictures

Featured image, a 2006 pen drawing called "Hallowe'en Spider," is reproduced from Pretty Pictures, Metropolis Books' new monograph on the innovative Vancouver typographer and graphic artist Marian Bantjes. She writes, "This would end up being the last of my Hallowe'en mailouts. It's a spider of phobias. If you look at its legs, you will see that there are phobias of many kinds written there. And the body of the spider contains the mark of a scary clown, with zombies chasing each other around the abdomen. Gruesome stuff. Shortly after I printed this, I decided I hated it. I very nearly didn't send it out, though in the end I did. I had a couple of hundred left over which went into the garbage, keeping only a few for my records. Looking back on it, it's not so bad."