Selected Essays is unlike any other Legenda series: rather than carrying entirely new monographs and collective volumes, we invite a single author at a time to sample from his or her entire career of work, aiming to make previously hard-to-find pieces available, and placing the whole in context. Some of the essays are from books, some from journal articles: some famous, and others hardly-noticed until now. New introductions offer the author a chance to self-assess, so to speak: to comment on his or her own methods.

We publish just two or three Selected Essays books each year, and we're very pleased now to announce a new one: volume 10, by the Edinburgh-based Peter Dayan, which will be called For the Love of Art.

Peter is above all concerned with intermediality: that is, with the interplay between music, art and literature, which often all come together in his work. Our cover shows one of Peter's case studies: the musical scores are by Erik Satie, while the images facing them are paintings by Henri Rivière. This attractive but rather curious book was in fact a souvenir, or an adaptation — take your pick — of a Montmartre cabaret performance called Le Tentation de saint Antoine. Music and image must tell the whole story here, since, a little enigmatically, none of what we might call the 'book of the musical' — that's to say, the words, the plot, and all of that — is included. What is going on here? Peter's essays look at just this sort of meeting of art forms: many confluences of many rivers.

For the Love of Art is due out in our Moving Image series in 2022.

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