Withnail & Prints

Limited edition prints and 'alternative' posters inspired by cult films have become quite the in-thing in recent years. The quick-sellouts and crazy secondary market prices for pretty much anything Mondo puts out has encouraged lots of similar enterprises on both sides of the Atlantic.

This summer, Print Club London has produced a slew of film-related work by various artists, and Withnail & I is represented in this print by the artist RYCA. I'm not sure what's going on with Withnail's mouth in the image, but the overall effect is rather good, with shades of Warhol's Elvis (to my untrained artistic eye, at least).

The print is 500 x 700mm, and limited to 200 copies signed by the artist, at £50 each. Not cheap, but very much the lower end of the going rate for such things. You can order a copy here.

Here's another, even more limited edition print, which I wish you could still order a copy of, as I'd love to have one, but alas the 50 produced all sold out in seconds a few years back (though copies have popped up on eBay since...). It's a typically witty idea by Olly Moss, the British artist who's a bit of a superstar in the world of Mondo prints and their ilk, thanks to his rapidly-becoming-iconic Star Wars posters, among many others. His Withnail image is simple, but brilliant...

Olly's work is all over eBay, but be prepared to pay decent money for the real McCoy - beware the pirated prints and posters! A slightly more affordable way to enjoy his stuff is to buy a copy of his first (and to date, only) book, Silhouettes From Popular Culture which I think is brilliant, but then I would, as with my Book Editor hat on, I was involved in bringing it into print.

You Gotta Be F***ing Kidding... A Thing From Another World Gallery

One of the select items currently on offer from Withnail Books via eBay is a vintage paperback of The Thing From Another World. It's actually the UK first edition, published by Cherry Tree Books (under their short lived Fantasy Books imprint), with great cover art by Terry Maloney. It's the only copy I can find currently for sale anywhere online. Here it is:

Campbell's novella was originally published in the August 1938 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction under the title Who Goes There?, but by 1952, when this edition reportedly appeared (there's no date inside), the story had become the basis of the Howard Hawks movie, hence the re-titling. The excellent Bear Alley blog has the details of the Fantasy Books line here.

UPDATE: The Withnail Books copy has now SOLD.

The story didn't make the cover of Astounding back in 1938, but was given pride of place when Shasta published a collection of Campbell's stories in 1948, with a truly bonkers dust jacket design by Hannes Bok.

Be prepared to pay comfortably into three figures for a copy of the Shasta edition which still has its wrapper, even more comfortably if it's one of the 200-odd (out of the 3,000 print run) which was signed by Campbell.

There's a later Shasta printing – post-movie – with a different design.

Nice, but the Bok definitely wins. To round off, here's a choice selection of The Thing things, from other early editions through to the essential John Carpenter movie (with its US one sheet painted by Drew Struzan in the course of one night, so tight was his deadline) and beyond...

(Those last three are Mondo prints by Tyler Stout, Randy Ortiz and Jock respectively. No, you can't get them any more – like all Mondo prints, they sold out in seconds – and no, you can't afford to buy them on the secondary market, even if you can find one for sale...)