Photographing the cover of Things I Took from the Dark

Photographing the cover of Things I Took from the Dark (Rory Lewis Photographer London)

Some sitters arrive at the studio with a face the public knows. Reece Shearsmith arrived with a museum.

Last October — a full year before the book would reach the shelves — he came to my Farringdon studio to sit for the cover of Things I Took from the Dark: The Museum of Me, his illustrated memoir, published by Quercus on 8 October. For thirty years — from The League of Gentlemen through Psychoville to Inside No. 9, which brought him and Steve Pemberton a BAFTA for its final series — Shearsmith has been British television's most reliable custodian of the uncanny. The book explains why. It is a guided tour of the collection he has spent a lifetime assembling: a vampire's coffin, haunted paintings, the screaming skull of Glamis, a talking mongoose called Gef. Part memoir, part catalogue of the impossible, illustrated throughout with his own drawings.

The portrait on the cover is a strict profile. It is the oldest convention in portraiture — the pose of Roman coinage, of Renaissance medals, of Piero della Francesca's Federico da Montefeltro, of Holbein's drawings of the Tudor court. A profile withholds. You are given the outline of a man rather than his gaze, and for a book about what its author keeps behind a locked door, that felt exactly right. It is also the pose of the museum bust, and the finished jacket completes the thought: Shearsmith set upon a marble plinth, an exhibit in his own collection, the crown of his head lifted away like the lid of a display case while his drawings climb out of it. Not every sitting requires the top of the sitter's head to come off. This one did.

My part was the photograph beneath all that — a portrait with the stillness to hold its ground under illustration, gilded framing and type. I lit him as I light my sitters: a single source, low and classical, the discipline I take from the Old Masters. A cover portrait is a collaboration with hands you may never shake — the designer, the illustrator, in this case the author's own pen — and the photograph must leave them room while losing none of its own weight.

There was a rightness to the address, too. The studio stands in Bleeding Heart Yard, off Greville Street in Farringdon — named, the story goes, for Lady Elizabeth Hatton, found dead on these cobbles one January morning in 1626, her heart, so the legend insists, still beating beside her. Dickens housed the Plornish family here in Little Dorrit. If a cover sitting for a museum of the macabre belonged anywhere in London, it belonged in this yard.

Things I Took from the Dark: The Museum of Me is published by Quercus on 8 October 2026 — 384 pages in hardback, with early praise from Jon Ronson and Diane Morgan — and Shearsmith takes the museum on the road this autumn with a live show of the same name. My thanks to Reece: a generous sitter, and a rare one — a man who lets you photograph the outside of a head knowing precisely what is kept inside it.