Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is a pop cultural master of fantasy and horror, and the new book “Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions” (Harper Design, $60), offers a deep dive into Del Toro’s creative process. The book teems with pages from his journals --- intricate drawings, scenarios and ideas, many of them fodder for movies such as “Hellboy,” Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Pacific Rim.”

Del Toro, who recently edited a six-volume horror series for Penguin Classics, is an avid collector and “Cabinet of Curiosities” also features photographs of Bleak House, his California home that holds his many collections of books, artifacts and even life-size models of some of his own characters and of author H.P Lovecraft. In an interview with The Times posted at our sister blog Hero Complex, he explained, “I bought my first book at 7. I started dreaming. There’s a writer, William Beckford, who wrote a Gothic novel called ‘Vathek.’ He had an abbey ... and he filled it with curiosities from all over the world. When I was a kid, all I could dream of was having a house like that. I wanted a huge library and to have H.P. Lovecraft in the library.”