Wednesday 20 June 2012

Sex in the Middle East

Sex and the Citadel is an upcoming (January 2013) non-fiction account of the changing sexual lives of men and women in the Arab countries. Given the usual Middle Eastern book cover cliches, you might expect some variation on pictures of headscarves and perhaps a phallic rifle or two. Fortunately, publisher Chatto & Windus have gone in a very different direction, taking a traditional Arabic design and slightly tweaking it to give it a more labial feel...

The original design that I believe inspired the cover



The US edition (Pantheon) has a proposed cover that's slightly less daring, though it's not finalised, by Peter Mendelsund...



5 comments:

Ian Koviak said...

bottom one is mendelsund.

JRSM said...

Thanks--I'll add that.

Anonymous said...

I can't help it, but the second one has to be a bad joke - I mean a phallic tower construct as cover picture for a book on sex, seriously?

That's so 70's.

Rex Parker said...

I used to play bass for Labial Feel.

JRSM said...

Ha ha ha! Ladies and gentlemen, Rex will be here (http://salmongutter.blogspot.com/) all week.