Beehive Books

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New stretch goal on our Herbert Crowley Kickstarter campaign: gorgeous bronze-plated Wigglemuch pins! Designed by Maelle Doliveux.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beehivebooks/the-temple-of-silence-forgotten-worlds-of-herbert/posts/1726842

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Herbert Crowley's esoteric personal philosophy on the nature of truth, dreams and art: “Hoping a thing will happen has nothing to do with dreams. A dream cannot happen. A dream is. It seems to me that we are made up of three parts: the circumference, the centre and the space in between. The circumference combats evil; the centre is the conclusion we come to from that combat; the space in between consists of conclusions purified. From this space in between arises a cone-shaped figure of vibrating truth which rises higher and higher as experience comes to us. From this combat of good and evil, dreams are born. Life cannot exist without the dream. The dream cannot exist without life. Developed life develops the dream. The finer the conclusions, the purer the life and the dreams. The purer the dreams the purer the life to come.” Learn more from our ongoing Kickstarter campaign. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beehivebooks/the-temple-of-silence-forgotten-worlds-of-herbert

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These strange symbols were stamped at the bottom of a print that Herbert Crowley made of his stunning TEMPLE OF DREAMS illustration. Can you decode them? First to solve the puzzle will receive a free copy of THE TEMPLE OF SILENCE: Forgotten Works & Worlds of Herbert Crowley.

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Herbert Crowley would work for upwards of a year on a single drawing in his Temple series. Though they are among his greatest visionary masterpieces, the work seemed to torment him. His frustration mounts in these excerpts of his letters to his dear friend Mary Mowbray-Clarke.

“I spotted in the figure – O.K., then the flowers – I got a leaf too dark – but turn back never – facts grinned and bade me go on – as the time flew…. So I went on knowing that every flower I put in was wrong. Each flower meant more nervousness – still I went on hoping that it would look OK in a mass – I reached the top today and all light has left it. It is a dead damp meaningless mass. All a waste of time – FACTS. … Now am I to start another one – under worse conditions? I am nearer the end than I was two weeks ago. My nervousness worse and the bank so much nearer dry. What will it be if I do start another? Can you imagine?

[...] My mind is in such a state that every moment away from that drawing board nigh maddens me & the hours I spend at it madden me even more. There is no let up – when it’s done what will it mean to me – nothing. So there we are. I have purchased a Welsbach mantel & am going to work at night – I must – the whole outlook is so absolutely dun-colored that I only get a chance to forget whilst at it… I feel as though I were promenading on borrowed knees. I am O.K. Physically. Anyway – I am so down and out mentally that all physical deficiencies disappear upon arrival…. I find the more I do on that drawing, the more I have to do.”

Learn more on our ongoing Kickstarter campaign.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beehivebooks/the-temple-of-silence-forgotten-worlds-of-herbert

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Hi friends! Just dropping a line to show another beautiful Crowley piece, and share a message from researcher Justin Duerr expressing gratitude to the passionate scholars, friends and artists who made this project possible along the way.

Please consider becoming one of our fellow travelers. We’re over 500-strong on our Kickstarter caravan. It’s full of song and spirit.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beehivebooks/the-temple-of-silence-forgotten-worlds-of-herbert

Justin writes:

When I first became enamored of this glowing, otherworldly comic strip called "the Wigglemuch" back in 2010 I could have never imagined that someday this astonishing work would be collected in full-length book form -- much less that I would be the author of that book.  

Judging just by looking at this Kickstarter, one would get the impression that pretty much all this work was undertaken by myself and my publishing partner Josh O'Neill. While it's obvious that this project wouldn't exist without us, there are of course other people who made massive and invaluable contributions over the years - the time of laying the foundations on which this filigree temple would be built. So I'd like to pause for a minute to highlight these collaborators and fellow architects of the Temple of Silence.  

Firstly, my wife and research partner Mandy Katz accompanied me on research trips around the globe, and we made the initial research trip together to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State University in 2010. She is directly responsible for many of the most crucial research breakthroughs - it was Mandy who, through persistent investigation, discovered both that Crowley's communal artist home of the 1910s (which is pictured in the Kickstarter video) still existed and that it was possible to find it and visit!

We went there on my birthday in summer of 2015, and while I was sitting in the 1700s era graveyard in the woods having a picnic, she found the hand-colored Herbert Crowley print in a raccoon's nest - which she offered to me as a birthday present! She made the initial connection to the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, who were so enthusiastic and helpful. She scanned literally hundreds of pages of Crowley's notebooks and sketchbooks in Zurich. All the while, she was full of insights and interpretations, and having someone with a different wellspring of knowledge to draw on during the research led to deeper understanding of many pieces of context.  

Another critical element Mandy added was her uncanny ability to read some of Herbert Crowley's - and most notably his wife Alice Lewisohn's - chicken-scratch scribble handwriting. Alice Lewisohn had the most unreadable handwriting of anyone I've EVER seen, and I've seen a lot - I actually thought many of her letters were shorthand, but they're just longhand written in such a way that they look more like formations made by wind or forces of slow erosion than text. One night Mandy was sick and spiked a fever. As usual I was obsessing over reading some of these impossible to decipher letters, and during the fever she suddenly gained (and luckily retained) the ability to read this handwriting!  

Next to Mandy I think the biggest contributor to this project has been Herbert Crowley's niece in Zurich, Susi. Not only did she offer to share her home with us (and feed us and show us around Zurich!) for several weeks while we archived her family's collection of Crowley's work, but she was very actively involved in the research process itself - she eventually tracked down other members of Crowley's family in the U.K., and she helped connect me with some of C.G. Jung's descendants - and others - all of whom in turn contributed further research and materials!  

My connection with Susi, meanwhile, came via Dan Nadel. It was in Nadel's excellent 2006 book anthology 'Art out of Time' that both Josh O'Neill and I first encountered Crowley's work. Nadel had been doing some further research himself, and Susi had contacted him. When he learned I was trying to archive the work, he was kind enough to connect us, and was very encouraging of the project, himself knowing how magical this work was.  

My old friend Billy Brett, who I know from years of playing music on the road, dug up the entire run of 'The Wigglemuch' on microfilm, which created a little bit of media buzz when he put it online. He also did some digging into various other avenues of the Herbert Crowley story, and he actually got me in touch with Dan Nadel! So you see how these things are a chain.  

Andrew O'Mara in Toronto basically tracked down Crowley in Canada, and it's because of him that Crowley's time in Canada is fleshed out beyond the bare-bones of knowing which years he spent there. Because of Andrew there are now photographs of Crowley's sculptures from Toronto, and his relationship with artist Elizabeth Knowles is part of the story.  

Regarding Crowley's time in the US in the early 1910s, and the artist's colony house in Rockland County NY, Janet Newman (whom me and Mandy met by chance when visiting in summer 2015) contributed not only some amazing insights, but connected us with Jethro, the great-grandson of Herbert Crowley's close friend Mary Mowbray-Clarke - who was so DEEPLY kind as to loan me her diaries spanning 1908 - 1913, which in turn made the biography much, much more three-dimensional!  

Mary Crowley in the U.K. sent me scans of Herbert Crowley's father's family album, Steve Sax sent a scan of a lost Crowley work titled "Discussion", Dwayne Bridges provided the best quality scan of one of Crowley's most in-depth works, "The Temple of Dreams", and William S. Wilson III, who originally salvaged the Sunwise Turn archive that now resides at the Smithsonian and the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, was kind enough to mail me several signed/dated books from Herbert Crowley's collection. Bill Wilson is the one contributor who sadly died before the book could be completed, and I hope somewhere somehow he knows of it. He was pretty excited about it and interested in it.  

For proofreading and technical help/advice with the biography Marybeth Chew, Corina Dross, and Abby Miller get a shout out! Thank you! And OBVIOUSLY there would be no book at all without the enthusiasm and support of Josh O'Neill/Beehive Books! I feel blessed by a sea of lucky stars that someone believed in this enough to make it real - and so happy that there is not a only a perfect-fit publisher for this work, but that they even happen to be local!  

All of this is not even crediting the MANY academic archives, museums, libraries, and institutions from which materials were drawn. I will highlight them in a future post, but wanted to use this post to thank and throw light on individual contributors! And thank YOU, for becoming a part of this chain of inspiration, and making this project possible!

Gratefully,

*Justin*

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YOU GUYS.

Our minds are blown, our hearts are full, and our feets are dancin’.

Thanks to the support of all of you, we funded this insane project in nine days flat.

Thank you, my beautiful friends, for spreading the word and showing so much passion for this amazing artwork. Thank you Justin Duerr for committing every ounce of yourself to bringing Herbert Crowley back from oblivion. and thanks Maelle Doliveux, Mila Milo, and Alexander Rothman for seeing us through to this point.

Watching this incredible swell of support for an artist who was essentially forgotten during his own lifetime, a century ago, is surreal and inspiring. Love can heal the wounds in the world, and visions can last forever.

I hope you don't think this means we’re going to shut up about Herbert Crowley now.

We’re just getting started.  <3

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"Bottledogs" by Herbert Crowley

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Herbert Crowley and his wife Alice Lewisohn moved to Zurich at the end of 1920s to enter psychoanalysis with Carl Jung. Though Crowley's relationship with Jung seems to have been troubled, they became members of Jung's inner circle of friends and analysands. Here's a strange symbolic map that Crowley drew of Jung's compound, and a sketchbook page in which he characterizes the members of Jung's circle in mythic, archetypal terms -- for instance "the wandering child," "the dark cloud," "the brute." Jung's lover and co-analyst Toni Wolff is "the keeper of the gate."

Jung is described as "the eye over all."

Learn more on our Kickstarter campaign.

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In 1910, Herbert Crowley created 16 Sunday comic strips for the New York Herald, 14 of which were published. As THE WIGGLEMUCH moved along it got stranger and stranger, and darker and darker. This is the final published strip, in which Wiggles emerges from a hell realm, and braces himself for a long swim towards distant mountains and new adventures that we never got to see.

Learn more on our Kickstarter campaign: 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beehivebooks/the-temple-of-silence-forgotten-worlds-of-herbert

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The whole team at Beehive Books extend our deepest thanks for the incredible supporters who’ve got us more than half way to our Kickstarter funding goal for THE TEMPLE OF SILENCE: FORGOTTEN WORKS & WORLDS OF HERBERT CROWLEY.

A message from Justin Duerr, researcher and author behind this beautiful book:

I am humbled and so, so proud to have been guided to work among these strange ghosts of the past in order to bring their worlds back to the eyes of the living. When I first encountered 'The Wigglemuch' in Dan Nadel's 2006 anthology 'Art out of Time' I KNEW there was immense potent magic living behind the crooked stage sets of those comic strips. The synchronicity that seemed to follow me uncannily in relation to the ensuing years of research seemed to indicate the presence of unseen actors, just aside the stage lighting of the sentient world, edging me on from discovery to revelation.

Perhaps it was because of the history - Herbert Crowley's work was once published, at least self-published, as two volumes in1913 - "Portfolio of Symbolic Designs" and "Portfolio of Decorative Designs." Both turned up for sale on Amazon sometime around 2013. They were, however, "currently unavailable."

My friend Billy Brett did some digging and found that they'd been listed as part of a deal wherein all titles held by the British National Library were listed on Amazon. Contacting the British Library, I was looking forward to visiting and perusing these lost books in their reading room.

But we live in a world of impermanence and occasional catastrophe. An email from the British Library informed us that these impossibly rare books had been destroyed: "On 10 May 1941 a large cluster of incendiary bombs fell all over the British Museum roof, causing heavy fires in many places. The South-West Quadrant of the Iron Library was entirely destroyed with the loss of over 250,000 volumes. Few books were salvaged; those which had survived the fire were destroyed or damaged by water." Among those lost were Herbert Crowley's irreplaceable volumes.

In 1925 Herbert Crowley and his wife Alice Lewisohn reached out to noted Paris-based literary agent William A. Bradley. They wanted to publish Herbert Crowley's work, with a focus on the comics. Herbert mentions, in several letters to Bradley, making a start on the book and looking forward to continuing work on it. Then nothing. There is no record that the book was ever finished, for unknown reasons.

So maybe this project is "due diligence" - a corrective to the past, and a mending of something not many alive knew needed mending.

In short, THANK YOU.

*Justin*

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Herbert Crowley

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“Rye” By Herbert Crowley

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Day 3 of our month long seance. the spirit of Herbert Crowley is stirring. Close your eyes and breathe shallowly -- you can feel his strange magic shifting and stretching, preparing to reenter the world. Your task is to make his temple ready. Visit the kickstarter here

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“Temple of Dreams” By Herbert Crowley

Support the team excavating his lost works on Kickstarter