Heaps of Hoyningen-Huene

The cover of an interesting-looking new novel from Serpent's Tail (Petitie Mort by Beatrice Hitchman)...

..also seems strangely familiar: this photo by George Hoyningen-Huene has graced (I us the word advisedly) a number of book covers in recent years:

..and not only in English:

This photo is much too classy for horrible old Ayn Rand--a  fistful of dog turds wrapped in cellophane would be more appropriate.

A Japanese publication, the title of which translates as 'The History of World Costume'

UPDATE: Sharp-eyed commenter Gervase Fen pointed out another, the about-to-be-published Black Roses, which oddly enough also uses the identical typeface to Petite Mort.

Radicals

The first of Verso's Radical Thinkers series of philosophy paperbacks have been out for a while, but I didn't see them until the most recent releases in the series came out in January. They've taken the potentially difficult task of illustrating complex ideas and tackled it using elegant, sometimes abstract and sometimes punning, line illustrations and patterns on a clean white background. I would once have suspected it would take a gun to the head to make me read more Baudrillard, but now I realise it might just take a pretty face!

Here are some of my favourites from the series so far. Click for bigger versions.

For more Wilhelm Reich sex madness, see this post

Infernal Addendum

To anyone who has ever corresponded with me because of this blog, I apologise that you have probably received a spam email recently via my hacked Yahoo account. Some bastard in Brazil has broken into my account via some recently discovered security holes in Yahoo, and spammed every single person I have ever emailed. If Dante were alive, I'm sure he'd be proposing a new tenth circle of hell for people like that.