MassArt and LAU External Collaborative Brief - Design Development 1

Research:

We created a joint Pinterest board, where we began to look at graphic design and publication examples that we thought communicated our ghost/hauntings theme, and from which we could take inspiration from when we designed our publication.

The design features we liked and all agreed we should try and include were:
- Blackletter
- Distorted type
- Black & White colour scheme
- Distortion/Disruption in  photo editing
- Ornamental/decorative elements

https://www.pinterest.com/tonyppham/leeds-%2B-massart/

Copy:

For the copy of our publication, I wrote up and shortened slightly the story we got from Leeds Central Library librarians 'Alexander Street 1'. Becca wrote up the other story we had found online 'The Phantom of Leeds Library'. Tony wrote up the introduction, credits and sources.

We wrote up the stories/copy first so that then we could create the visuals/illustrations/graphics afterwards, so that they highlighted and supported the stories. We wanted the stories to be brought to life by our visuals.

The Hauntings of Leeds Library

Table of Contents

Intro - A History of Leeds Central Library

The Leeds Central Library was founded in 1768. The legendary chemist Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, was one of the library’s first subscribers. The library moved from place to place for a number of years, before, in 1808, finally settling in first-floor premises on Commercial Street, in the centre of the city. The library was constructed in 1878-1884 and designed by Leeds’ own George Corson. Libraries of this kind were a feature of many towns in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The total cost of the building was around £120,000.

It still stands there today. It remains an extraordinary place, musty and quiet, a repository of ancient volumes, a warren of shadowy corners, winding staircases, endless cellars and lonely galleries.

Alexander Street 1

Whoever murdered six-year-old Barbara Waterhouse had taken a terrible risk. No one knew better than Constable Willie Ross the danger the killer was willing to go, to dispose of the body when he bundled it into the tattered grey shawl and left it in the cobbled yard in Alexander Street, Leeds, just a hundred yards from the Town Hall.

For just an hour before 11 o’clock on the night of June 10, 1891, the officer had checked the Municipal Offices delivery yard and seen nothing suspicious.

An hour later at the same spot his lantern illuminated the ghastly bundle and with a policeman’s in-bred curiosity Willie lifted the corner of the shawl. He could just make out a bloodstained leg. Quickly summoning help from the other officers with his whistle, the shawl and its contents were taken round to the Town Hall police office for a closer inspection.

Inside was the body of Barbara Waterhouse, daughter of quarryman David Waterhouse who lived in Horsforth. Barbara had been missing from home in the then tiny village since the previous Saturday, June 6.

Her throat had been cut from ear to ear almost severing the head and she was ripped from groin to chest. In all there were 46 separate stab wounds. Strips of flesh hung from her tiny legs and the torso had been completely drained of blood.

It was a crime which shocked the country and gave the cold-blooded murderer the grisly distinction of being the first man to hang in Armley Jails’ newly constructed execution shed. The Leeds Borough Police knew at once who the victim was and within 40 hours the murderer and his pitiful accomplice were in custody.

Several hours before the body had been found on the Wednesday night, 58-year old Mrs Ann Turner and her 32-year-old son Walter Lewis Turner, a millhand, both of Back Lane, Horsforth, had brought the body, in a yellow tin trunk, by train the five miles to Leeds.

After a series of investigative events, a trial, and only 15 minutes of jury discussion, in sentencing Walter Lewis Turner to death Mr Justice Grantham told him: “This is the most atrocious crime it has ever been my lot to try. Had the people in whose midst this crime was committed ever got hold on you, you would have met death at their hands. Had these people seen, as I saw, the way in which this poor little girl was mutilated I am afraid that no power of the law - nor all the police of this town of Leeds - could ever have prevented them tearing you limb from limb.”

Turner, who three years before had been sent to prison for nine months after attempting to cut the throat of his wife at their home in Saltaire, and from whom he was now separated, showed little emotion or regret during his wait for execution. On the morning of August 18, 1891, having “slept well and eaten a hearty breakfast,” he walked to the newly built execution shed.

As the white cap was placed over his head Turner told the executioner, Billington: “I don’t want that” and went calmly to his death.

Leeds Central Library is now built directly upon the courtyard that was once occupied by poor little Barbara Waterhouse’s body. Several sightings of Barbara have been reported in the library ever since.

The Phantom in Leeds Library

Source: https://www.on-magazine.co.uk/yorkshire/stories/phantom-in-leeds-library/

Leeds, like every city, has its share of ghost stories. But not many ghost stories are as creepily detailed as that recounted by the young Leeds librarian John MacAlister in 1844. And few encounters with the walking dead take place in a location as evocative as the 250-year-old Leeds Library.

Into this strange world of learning and lore came John MacAlister. In May 1880, aged just twenty-four, MacAlister was appointed the library’s head librarian. For four years he worked in the quiet chambers without incident: arranging the ancient collections, advising scholars, perhaps taking time to repair loose pages or flaking book-bindings.

“Strange, shuffling gait”

For some reason, his work kept him late at the library one evening in March, 1844. So late, in fact, that he suddenly realised that was in danger of missing his last train home to Harrogate. Grabbing his things and snatching up a lamp, he dashed from his office. As he hastened through the dark library, the lamp he was carrying suddenly, and startlingly, illuminated a man’s face at the end of a gloomy passageway. A burglar, John supposed. Heart pounding, he ran back to his office – and returned with a loaded revolver.

In the dusty silence of the library, he shouted a warning – more in the faint hope that a policeman passing by in the street outside might hear him and come to his aid than in any expectation of rousting the intruder. No answer. He shouted again – his quavering voice echoed among the high, dark shelves. No answer.

Then, from behind a bookcase, the face reappeares. It is no burglar. The face is pallid and hairless, with deep, heavy, shadowy eye-sockets. Hesitantly, gripping the butt of his revolver, MacAlister advances towards it. Now he sees not only a face but a body – an old man’s body, tall, with high shoulders – and seeming, as MacAlister watches in amazement, to rotate out of the end of the bookcase. The figure turns its back on MacAlister. Moving with a strange, shuffling gait, it walks quickly away from the bookcase, and into the library’s small lavatory.

“Linger among the old books”

MacAlister followed the figure – and found that it had vanished. There was no trace of anyone in the tiny room. ‘I confess I began to experience for the first time what novelists describe as an “eerie” feeling,’ the librarian later remembered.

It was a local priest, Charles Hargrove, who, on hearing John McAlister’s disturbing tale, identified the strange, hairless figure as one Vincent Sternberg, John’s predecessor as librarian. Sternberg matched MacAlister’s description of the library ghost: he had lost all his hair in a gunpowder blast, and since the accident had walked with a shuffling gait. Sternberg had died several months previously.

This was not the end of the haunting of the Leeds Library. Sternberg’s ghost continues, it seems, to linger among the old books. Librarians working at the library after dark report extinguished lamps being mysteriously re-lit in Sternberg’s old office. MacAlister himself notices an even stranger phenomenon: odd, resonant vibrations issuing from a long library table. These are attributed to ‘Sternberg’s gong’: the old librarian had been accustomed to keep a gong on that table, which he would strike when he needed a colleague’s assistance.

“Communicating through knocking”

In 1885 things begin to get out of hand. A group of young librarians, in adventurous mood, convenes a seánce. They are determined to make definite contact with the restless spirit of Vincent Sternberg.

Afterwards, they report that Sternberg, communicating through knocking sounds, has brushed aside the veil and emerged from the Other Side to make a terrible confession: sometimes, when head librarian, he had given away library books to friends.

At a later seánce, the irritable ghost provokes a former head librarian into accusing him of fiddling the library’s accounts. Boyish pranks, no doubt.

Nevertheless, it seems that hairless, shuffling, gong-striking Vincent Sternberg has managed to get well and truly under his successor’s skin. One afternoon, as ‘Sternberg’s gong’ again rang out eerily in the library reading room, library employee Albert Edmunds urges John MacAlister to commune with the spirit in private, and learn its secrets once and for all.

Credits

“The City as Narrative” is a project in collaboration with Leeds Arts University and Massachusetts College of Art and Design Spring 2019.

Taught by:

Scott Bakal

Teresa Flavin

Elizabeth Resnick

Amber Smith

Illustration by:

Alex Brown

Katie Burke

Design by:

Becca Jones

Tony Pham

Migle Saveikyte

Photography by:

Alex Brown

Katie Burke

Becca Jones

Tony Pham

Migle Saveikyte

Sources:

Smyth, R. (2019) The Phantom in Leeds Library. [online] Available at: https://www.on-magazine.co.uk/yorkshire/stories/phantom-in-leeds-library/?fbclid=IwAR315Kuew9qwl4C5jksA-5jnOkNUT5xXBCbLZ0DeGv5jE3Ryg-G3e_a7E3k [Accessed: 05/03/2019]

Anon. (n.d) Alexander Street 1. Article scan retrieved from Leeds Central Library.

Illustrations:

After we had the copy written, our illustrators Katie and Alex began working on some illustrations that would support the two ghost/haunting stories. They took inspiration not only from the stories, but also from the Leeds Central Library and the research we had collected there. They did some illustrations on top of the disposable camera photographs we had taken, as well as some smaller illustrations of patterns that could be used as a decorative/ornamental elements within the publication.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Distorted Type:

One of the visual/graphic style we really liked and wanted to include in our publication was distorted typography. The reason for this was because by distorting some of the typography within our publication, we were able to create an uneasy and off-putting atmosphere. When the type is distorted, it is less legible and harder for the viewer/audience to read it, which creates this sense of discomfort. We thought that such an atmosphere and discomfort is fitting with out ghost/haunting theme of the publication, and will make the experience of reading the publication more emotive for the audience.

With that in mind, Graphic Designer Becca from our group created a variety of distorted type using a scanner. She took quotes and words from the two ghost stories we had chosen/written, and after printing them out in several different typefaces, she used a scanner to physical pull the quotes/phrases along the scanner to create the distorted effect. She also edited those scans afterwards, to clean up the backgrounds and play around with colour/composition.

Photo Editing: 

Another visual/graphic element we wanted to include was some form of distortion/disruption in our photo editing. Although the photographs we had collected during our research stage were effective as they were, we wanted to make sure that all the content in our publication even individually created the uneasy and discomfort feel/atmosphere we were aiming for. For this reason we wanted to create/add some distortion and disruption to the disposable camera photographs, so that their creepy and dark atmosphere could be reinforced and brought out even more.

I took on this task, and first started with a quick list of ideas of how I could create the sense of distortion and disruption with the photographs:
- Apply red paint textures (blood)
- Burn holes/edges
- Create glitches, morph/distort
- Overlay distorted type
- Make collages
- Overlay patterns/textures

Bearing in mind some of my quick ideas, I began to experiment with the disposable camera photos, and play around with type, repetition, composition, brushes and etc.

I tried adding streaks of a red colour to mimic blood smears. Although this looks visually quite interesting, it does not look quite enough like blood for it to be effective at creating an emotion response from the viewer/reader.

Through the use of repetition, I tried to create some suspense and a feeling of being overwhelmed. The words I choose were some of the most visually disturbing and intriguing phrases from the stories, and by repeating them I aimed to get them stuck in the readers/audiences head, so that in a way they may be 'haunted' by those phrases/quotes.

Here I created 'rips' in the photograph, with the aim of making it seem as if the ghost are aware we were taking photographs of them, and that they were not please. The stripes/rips look quite intriguing and would possibly make the reader question what they are meant to symbolise.

Using repetition within the photographs I tried to create a sense of depth. In this case I wanted the photograph to feel as if it is pulling you inwards, which would add to the uneasy and discomforting atmosphere we were trying to create within the design of our publication.

Using typography, I tried to enhance the atmosphere of the photographs. In this edit, I tried to make the quote look as if it was a ghost, as well as to make it look as if the quote itself was 'lingering among the old books'. 

Here I utilised the imperfection/light bleed that was created in one of the disposable photographs. I choose a quote that very powerful and a little overwhelming, and also created a moment of reveal/surprise. The last word in the quote is 'death', and by taking advantage of the light bleed, I made the word 'death' ever so slightly darker than the white light bleed. In this way, you can still see and read the word, but only after a little while of looking at the graphic. Straight away you cannot notice it. I think this creates surprise and shock for the reader/audience, as they do not expect to see a word there, yet alone such a disturbing word. 

Here I played around with adding different dark and gloomy effects to the same photo. I did this to create a sense of looking at the same thing but through different sets of eyes, or with different motives in mind. I created here a representation of what the ghosts would see, or maybe what the person would see if they were being approached by the ghosts. 

Throughout all the edits I had created, I aimed to make the edits feel wrong or unreal in some way. This was with the idea that the audience/reader would then look at these images/edits and feel uneasy or discomforted. I also tried to think about the ghost aspect, and how an encounter with a ghost, or the ghost itself would change the atmosphere/surroundings of the images.