A Fox, a Skeleton, and a Whisky Bottle: Designing Labels for a Night at Shapero Rare Books
- Edward Luper
- Nov 14
- 2 min read
The whisky tasting at Shapero Rare Books was more than just an event; it felt like the coming together of many strands of my creative life. What most people didn’t see behind the scenes was the unlikely, joyful spark that set the whole thing in motion.
Some months ago, the furniture dealer and collector Marcus Flacks approached me with an idea. Marcus is one of those rare people whose energy fills a room even when he’s only sending a WhatsApp message, restless, imaginative, endlessly enthusiastic. He told me he was collaborating with Shapero for a special whisky night and wanted a small run of bottles with original labels. His only brief:
“Make them Halloween-themed. Go wild.”
How could I possibly resist?
The freedom he handed me was intoxicating. I immediately thought of Holbein’s “Dance of Death”, those wonderfully macabre little woodcuts where skeletons skip around with the living, reminding us that life is fleeting but art endures. At the same time, my mind drifted to the world of ukiyo-e ghost stories, those airy, eerie spirits that glide in from the paper with such delicate menace.
And then there was something even more personal. During the long, strange months of Covid, when the world felt suspended and I wasn’t sure what form my work should take, I actually drew an entire comic about fox spirits. Hardly anyone knows this; it was something private, almost a survival project. The trickster fox, playful, hungry, unpredictable, was a companion of sorts. So when Marcus mentioned Halloween, it felt completely natural to return to that figure.
The result? A fox dancing with a skeleton, the two of them swirling together as if they had just stepped out of a Holbein woodcut and wandered into an Edo ghost scroll before arriving, inevitably, on a bottle of whisky in Mayfair.
Seeing those bottles lined up at Shapero that night was unexpectedly moving. The atmosphere in the bookshop was warm, the whiskies superb, and the labels seemed to take on a character of their own under the lamplight. Guests laughed, sipped, examined the artwork, and told their own stories. It felt like the fox and the skeleton had joined the party.
I’m grateful to Marcus for the trust and the creative freedom, and to Shapero Rare Books for hosting such an elegant evening. Collaborations like this remind me why I love what I do: art slips into unexpected places, sometimes even onto a whisky bottle, and suddenly the whole world feels a little more alive.
Whisky with my labels available to purchase on the link below:
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