Journal & Topics Media Group

Visions Of H.G. Wells, Morris Inspire Local Artist Rex Parker


Parker is working on a poster series, which compares H.G. Wells’ 19th century space travelers to the moon (left) with Willam Morris’ medieval fantasy worlds (right).

What if you discovered original printed editions of classic tales, illustrated with lush details and elegant lettering from more than a century ago? Could you ever go back to the slim, cheap paperbacks which emerged in the 1960s with no illustrations except on the front cover, or the scanned images on a modern computerized book?

Park Ridge artist and designer, Rex Parker, admits he’s started looking at older printed editions and is inspired by the glory of the older art books and the artists who created unique typefaces to match the tales.

But if there hadn’t been a resurgence of interest in these tales 50 years ago as publishers reached for Morris fantasies to reissue along with J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, or rediscovered Wells in Hollywood’s science fiction film versions, they might still be languishing, forgotten on used book store shelves.

Parker, a former alderman, may be best known locally for his creative posters which appear in the kiosk signboards in Uptown and have featured many Park Ridge Civic Orchestra themes. His Farmer’s Market poster, inspired by former resident Grant Wood’s painting “American Gothic,” features a corncob girl and a pumpkin-head man, and is decked out in the 2020 edition wearing protective COVID-19 face masks.

Parker’s interest in Frederic Goudy, a famous typeface designer, started in Bloomington, Ill., their downstate hometown. Goudy moved to Park Ridge in 1903 to start The Village Press (seven years before Park Ridge upgraded to a city). For a Goudy anniversary in 2018, he took Goudy’s distinctive lettering designs and the projects they were designed to illustrate and did a series of retrospective posters for “Goudy from A to Z.”

That in turn led to researching the contemporaries with whom Goudy collaborated, and discovering authors who would be inspired by the past and look to the future.

Parker was excited to find links between science fiction legend H.G. Wells and fantasy writer and poet William Morris. Morris would influence the Arts and Crafts era with furnishings, textiles, hand-designed lettering, and medieval battlefields.

Parker is developing a series of posters on these two Englishmen’s famous books, similar to his Goudy work from several years ago. One of these shows a Wellsian spaceman on one side and a battle scene with Morris’s armored knights.

Parker was invited to speak in England to a combined meeting of The H.G. Wells Society and the William Morris Society Museum at Kelmscott House in London, England. Originally planned for a live presentation, his speech became a Zoom meeting from Park Ridge on Saturday, July 11. “H. G. Wells and William Morris: The Golden Age of Sci-Fi and Fantasy Fiction” was attended by members of both groups.

Wells (1866 to 1946) envisioned the future in many ways, from “The Door in the Wall” for which Goudy designed the special type, to “The Invisible Man,” “The Time Machine,” “The Island of Doctor Moreau” and “The First Men on the Moon.” The first three also became Hollywood films in the science fiction genre. This year marks the 125th anniversary of the publication of “The Time Machine.”

The impact of Wells’ stories sometimes took time to discover. He wrote “The War of the Worlds” in 1898, but it was really brought to public attention in its dramatized American radio debut in 1938. Mercury Theater director Orson Welles and his cast made their drama so convincing that audiences were sure there was a space invasion in progress. It remains a pivotal moment of 20th-century broadcasting.

Wells switched to politics later. He argued for peace and the League of Nations (a World War I proposal that would evolve into the United Nations after World War II). He was considered a Fabian Socialist.

Parker calls Morris (1834 to 1896) a “once in a century creative genius.”

Morris designed furniture and fabrics, textile patterns and his own typefaces but he also wrote of knights and nobles in imaginary lands, a more elegant atmosphere than Wells.’ He illustrated his limited edition novels with illuminated manuscripts.

His fantasy worlds like his romance in “The Well at the World’s End” (1896) inspired 20th-century writers. He, like Wells, advocated socialist ideals.

His interest in design and work with artists and architects of his generation also led to founding the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877, an early effort for historic preservation in Britain.

Their careers overlapped a generation of writers who are still known today, Parker says: George Bernard Shaw, Henry James, W. B. Yeats, and Oscar Wilde.

Parker’s research on both sides of the Atlantic offered some extra details for the British listeners. Wells had been in contact with Upton Sinclair, whose expose on the Chicago Stockyards “The Jungle” had led to an effort by President Theodore Roosevelt to clean up the meat processing industry. Sinclair’s same 1906 visit to Chicago got him acquainted with Jane Addams and her Hull House settlement.

Rex Parker shares his enthusiasm for H.G. Wells and William Morris with members of their modern British fan groups during an online program in July.

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