Back to the Wells, Part 6: The Food of the Gods by Matthew R. Bradley.

A Back to the Wells, Part 6: The Food of the Gods by Matthew R. Bradley Paul Lehr’s vivid 1967 painting to illustrate H.G. Wells’s The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904) is the least representational of his quintet for my beloved Berkley Highland editions. In muted earth tones, it depicts rocky hills and a plain occupied by tiny crowds of people and several giant eggs, plus a huge, newly hatched chick; the largest is in the foreground, with a crack through which what appears to be a mammoth eye can be seen. Standing in front is an indistinct green, robed and hooded figure suggesting a bizarre hybrid of the Statue of Liberty and the Grim Reaper, with one arm upraised, and the other holding what might be a book, yet also seems to evoke the tablets bearing the Ten Commandments. Book I, “The Dawn of the Food,” introduces Bensington, a Fellow of the Royal Society and former president of the Chemical Society, and Professor Redwood, a physiologist in London University’s Bond…