Sunday, August 9, 2009

The Necronomicon: Gontier Edition

Artist Laurent Gontier has created not only an impressive, hand-crafted version of the Necronomicon, but a variety of other historical tomes. The text of his website is in French, but his ample illustrations transcend any language barriers.





Among his other works is a fantastically detailed recreation of the Grail Diary from "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade".



As an aside, finding sites like Mr. Gontier's is difficult because of the language barrier reinforced by search engines like Google. From personal experience I know that France, Germany, and Japan have large and enthusiastic communities of Lovecraft fans, but their counterparts in the United States rarely see much of their excellent work. While I actively look for new props and artwork on a regular basis it's very rare that I ever get a search engine result for a non-English page, even when photos and text are purposely flagged with "Cthulhu" or "Necronomicon".

Admittedly, part of the problem probably comes from my own language limitations. I have a tourist-level vocabulary of maybe a hundred words and phrases each in French, German, Spanish, and Italian, just enough so that I can be reasonably polite while I'm traveling. That's not nearly the level of familiarity needed to access the numerous non-English LARP and artist's sites around the world. That said, I'd like to actively encourage anyone aware of sites I would be interested in to email me links.

Update: Mr. Gontier was kind enough to send over some more detailed photographs of his work. A closeup of inserts for the Indiana Jones Grail Diary:



More pages from his Necronomicon reproduction:










The accompanying notes from the Necronomicon:





In addition to visiting his website, you can reach Mr. Gontier via email at: lgontier[at]free.fr

4 comments:

Chris said...

The excellent LucasArts game of Indian Jones and the Last Crusade came with a replica grail diary, which was also used for copy protection. It was full of different descriptions of the grail, one of which you discover is accurate during the course of the game. The one picked was different ever game, so woe be unto he who hath not the book... lest he choose... poorly...

Propnomicon said...

I'd heard that the videogame grail diary was a useful resource for recreating a prop version, but the details of how it was used for copy protection are new to me. What an ingenious idea.

Lgontier said...

And this Grail Diary réplica has been really useful for creating my own réplica. The newpaper clipping and some of the text come from this great source.

Mik said...

Pretty awesome work, which reminds me I need to pull my copy of the Grail Diary I made off the shelf and weather it.