Many of you have discovered our exclusive line of Levenger Press books. And yet not all of our literary pursuits are bound between book covers.
We sometimes go three-dimensional, as we have with Ogden Nash’s poem on the porpoise and E.B. White’s story and poem about his winsome pooch.
Another author in our pantheon of writers most admired is Jack London. Did you read The Call of the Wild and White Fang? Several of us here at Levenger did and were bowled over by how beautifully crafted these classic American tales are.
The stars of those stories were just begging to be captured in 3-D. And now they are.
Mim Harrison, our editor of Levenger Press, gives you the back story on our new sculptures of The Call of the Wild and White Fang. (And I have a follow-up question for you at the end of the post.)
—Steve
Jon Bickley just seemed like a natural to create these bookends. A British sculptor, Jon crafted the larger-than-life statue of Samuel Johnson’s cat Hodge, which is on permanent patrol outside Johnson’s house in London. Later he sculpted Hodge in miniature as a bookend for Levenger (sorry, we've sold out). I had met Jon and knew he was an animal lover of the highest order.
There was just one problem: Jon’s British, and Jack London was most emphatically American. How could Jon artistically scale that daunting distance across the pond?
“That’s the great thing about books,” says Jon. “They cross continents and cut through boundaries.”
But his words are far from mere rhetoric. As it turned out, Jack London’s books were all but imprinted in Jon’s soul.
The call to the child
“The Call of the Wild and White Fang were some of the first books I remember reading for myself,” says Jon. “I was about seven years old.”
He was “animal-mad,” as his mum called him, even then. Reading Jack London sealed it.
“The Call of the Wild was the first book I knew that suggested animals had lives outside of human beings’, that they were entities unto themselves and not just add-ons to humans,” Jon says. Then he adds:
“It’s about respect. We have to respect the other creatures in the world.”
Wolf-Man Jon
The two books continued to call to him. At art college, Jon read them again, fascinated by the wild places of London’s stories, so different from the tame and tidy world of England.
And recently, he read them once more, this time in readiness for sculpting the wolves.
“Once I read the books this time ’round, I had an image of what the dogs looked like,” Jon says. “Books create images in your mind, without being fettered by illustrations.”
But here again, there was just one problem: unlike with Johnson’s cat, there are no wolves in England. And Jon is a sculptor whose works are grounded in authenticity. After all, he’d combed many of England’s beaches looking for the kind of oyster that Johnson would feed to Hodge.
“I used to work as a zookeeper in Kent,” says Jon. “We kept wolves.”
Who knew?
Wakes up with wolves
“The wolves had big packs,” Jon continues, “and they were allowed to sort out their own hierarchy. They lived behind the house that I stayed in, and they’d often howl at 3:00 a.m.” A bit disconcerting, he adds.
Symmetry, balance, the fundamental shape of wolves—all these were in Jon’s head when he set to work sculpting the wolves. But what was in his soul? What would make these statues haunting, memorable creatures?
The bases, in part. (Surprise.)
“I wanted the bases to look as if they could have come from Jack London’s period,” Jon explains. “It’s a bit like framing a picture. They’re not part of the picture, but they are part of the impression the picture creates. It’s taking things in context, and it does change the way you view them.”
But there has to be more to it than merely putting these wolves on their pedestals. When you first encounter these sculptures—especially the two together—they’re startling, they’re so lifelike.
Much of it has to do with the poses of each one. Jon took his cue from the quotations we had selected to be engraved on the bookends.
It was the long wolf-howl, full-throated and mournful, the first howl he had ever uttered.
That was from White Fang, and thus Jon's sculpture shows the creature in mid-howl, crossing the threshold into a place he had not been before, and where humans could not follow.
There is a patience of the wild—dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself.
For The Call of the Wild, the image in Jon's mind (unfettered by illustrations) when he read the quote was the metamorphosis of Buck. "It's what Buck became as he changed into a wild wolf after being a tame dog," Jon says.
Perhaps this is where some sculptors would have stopped, content that they'd captured the essence of these wild spirits. For Jon, there was something else calling to him.
“With wolves, the detail is all in the eyes. It’s the difference between a piece of taxidermy and looking at a live wolf. If you can get the eyes right, you’ve got it. It’s as we say of humans: the eyes are the window into the soul.”
—Mim
And now to you, dear reader—are there books you “see” in 3-D? And do you envision them, as Jon did Jack London’s, without being prompted by illustrations? And what of wolves--are there wolves in your mind's eye? Do you find them scary or attractive, or both? I’d love to hear your ideas. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).
—Steve
