Project for THR Volume 1

Okay, okay, so brushing past the fact that Bindlegrim made the mistake of waking up in the real world  (with things like stale coffee, office banter, and dangerous commutes) seems it all just put hin back to sleep, dreaming about the garden at Ichabod's Cottage to see if there's a pumpkin vine or two still crawling along the ground. And so this little project came to be...

First of all, for sure, Bindlegrim loves vintage Halloween! With so many direct influences from vintage objects on Bindlegrim's artwork for lanterns, postcards,  etc., there was destined to be some kind of project that involved that olde stuff more directly. Looks like this is it. An archive library, The Halloween Retrospect, houses a whole bunch of vintage information objects (including content from nearly 500 vintage catalogs) and decided to put together a small digest of research from those sources. Of course, that's going to need some work on the book (particularly the cover), and then there's the website, creating a logo, and on and on. But, well, it's all ready now, and here to share. 

So, Bindlegrim had fun at first revisiting some old ghouls from an early lantern, and found this witch face from the very first lantern prototype in 2011.

4 sides of Bindlegrim prototype lantern from 2011

Once in a layout, she took over and let the scene coalesce around her..., and here is the cover for the book which should be available around end of July and/or beginning of August. (It's ready but has a layout bug that needs fixing). 

Cover art for The Halloween Retrospect, Volume 1 by Bindlegrim

That offered a chance to do something more with the art, to offer the books a little extra something to go with them. From out of the cover art, four bookmark-tallies were created to accompany the mailer. Here they are below:

Set of 4 bookmark-tallies, an extra with official copies of the book.

The book also comes with an 11"x17" fold out poster featuring a 1926 Halloween ad of products for schools (very fun stuff), and has some nice color and black and white illustrations across 32 pages. It's a 9"x6" publication, much like those old novelty catalogs, and is sure to have some good info for those into vintage Halloween collectibles. Here are some sneak peek images:

The Halloween Retrospect Vol 1, with poster and 4 tally cards.

The Halloween Retrospect Vol 1, with poster and 4 tally cards.

Oh, and last but not least, Bindlegrim put together a little website for the project: https://halloweenretrospect.com, and the logo below is a link there. Hope you enjoy the return of Bindlegrim, and the book...!