Hell The People and Places

A descent into discovering different versions of hell and its realms of torture around the world across literature, religions, culture, and folklore, gorgeously illustrated and accompanied by writing on the origins and details of each hell.

Whether it’s a real place, a human construct, an idea, or a superstition, hell is a grotesque demimonde in literature, cultures, religions, and folklore throughout the ages. There are many different hells to be found, each one distressing in its own way. But they all share the same essence: they are terrible places guarded by one or more evil spirits, where punishment is split into various levels of damnation.

Those who wish to venture on this dangerous journey beyond the gates of the underworld will find their guide in two extraordinary authors and graphic designers: Seymour Chwast and Steven Heller. And like Dante in the footsteps of Virgil, they will be able to navigate their way through the burning (or icy!) dark realms that lurk in the heart of the human imagination—the Jewish Gehenna, the Sunni Jahannam, the Swahili Jehanum, the Mayan Xibalba, and many others—as well as all the characters who have created hell, visited it, or been involved in more or less fortunate descents into it.

Equally appealing to fans of the literary hellscape of Dante's Inferno, the bright utopia of The Good Place, and the dark humor of Edward Gorey, Hell offers a feast of chillingly hilarious graphic art and illuminating content that comprehensively plumbs the multiple depths of the underworld.

Steven Heller is the author, editor, and coauthor of more than two hundred books on design, typography, political and satirical art, and illustration (Including Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York), and fifteen of them with Seymour Chwast. For thirty-three years he was alternately an art director and book columnist for the New York Times Book Review. Currently he is the co-chair of the School of Visual Arts MFA Design program in New York.
 
Seymour Chwast is co-founder of Push Pin Studios and has been director of the Pushpin Group, where he reintroduced graphic styles and transformed them into a contemporary vocabulary. His designs and illustrations have been used in advertising, animated films, and editorial, corporate, and environmental graphics. He has created more than 150 posters and has designed and illustrated more than 50 children’s books. His work has been the subject of three books, including Seymour Chwast: The Left-Handed Designer. Many museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Library of Congress (Washington DC), and the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), have collected his posters. He has lectured and exhibited worldwide and is in the Art Directors Hall of Fame. He is the recipient of the 1985 Medal from the American Institute of Graphic Artists. He lives in New York City.