Caustic Cover Critic

Dull Graves

2012-01-18T14:26:00.000-08:00

So I get my copies of two of the newest Penguin Modern Classics, reprints of some of the lesser-known Robert Graves novels. And they have no fucking covers, or at least no cover art: just the basic template text for the series. And they're £15 each. For no fucking cover.

I'm not impressed. I mean, here's a cover I came up with and put together in literally 7 minutes for Wife to Mr Milton, using only a public domain image and a free stock photo. It's far from a work of brilliance, but it's better than nothing, surely. Do they want people to pick these books up or not? Madness!

And there seem to be at least 4 other Graves reprints lined up with the same non-covers. I hope this can't-be-arsed attitude doesn't spread to the rest of the Modern Classics line.

Flipping Hitch

2012-01-16T20:06:00.000-08:00

An odd thing I just noted. Here are the Australian and one of the UK covers for the late Christopher Hitchens' big book of essays, Arguably.

It's the same photo, but for no readily apparent reason, flipped over. This means that somebody had to go in and fix the book spines in the flipped image (which would be the UK version at bottom), though it hasn't been done quite perfectly. The Vanity Fair Portraits on the floor has had its spine fixed, but not the front cover (original on left, retouched on right--click for bigger).

And the books on the shelves have been changed, too: the books in the box have been flipped around, but the book immediately above them has had its spine flipped, but not its cover--peer closely, and you'll see the mismatch.

So I find myself wondering why this was done at all? Why flip such a tricky photo when the original seems fine? Why make so much pointless work for a graphic designer? And, more importantly, why have I then wasted a whole heap of time peering at this and pointing it out?

Slinkachu

2012-01-12T15:31:00.000-08:00

Slinkachu is a deservedly successful artist who creates miniature street scenes on real-life streets, photographing them and then leaving them behind to become part of the environment, and a mystery for those who might later encounter them. He's put out two collections so far, Little People in the City (the front cover of which is 'They're not pets, Susan.') and the exhibition catalogue Concrete Island.

Here are some of his photos from the books.

I bring him up now because yesterday saw the release of the English translation of Belgian writer Dimitri Verhulst's book The Misfortunates by Portobello Books. Portobello wisely commissioned Slinkachu to create the cover for this tale of a family of Belgian drunks and their misadventures.

See much more of Slinkachu's work at his site, or visit the blog where he posts new work.

A Post that Points to the Archives

2012-01-09T13:39:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post here in response to a couple of things. First, I was sad to learn that Ronald Searle had died. For a look at his excellent and wide array of book cover designs, please see here, with follow-ups here and here.

Then there was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Charles Addams, which Google celebrated on the search home page, and which sent a startling number of visitors to this collection of his book covers.

I'll be raising a glass to the memory of these two great, bleak, scabrous cartoonists.

Scouting

2012-01-04T16:56:00.000-08:00

Last year I came across the Good Ink venture of Scout Books, a publishing and printing company that produces small and attractive chapbooks. Good Ink created the American Shorts series, in which ten great American short story writers had one (or occasionally more) of their best stories printed is an individual book, with illustrations by a young artist (many of them cartoonists and comics artists). On Monday I finally got the last few books in the series, filling out my collection of the full ten, so it's time to share. Click on any of the photos for much bigger versions.

Ambrose Bierce, illustrated by Francois Vigneault; Washington Irving illustrated by Bwana Spoons

Scott Fitzgerald illustrated by Vanessa Davis; Kate Chopin illustrated by Gemma Correll

Mark Twain illustrated by Meg Hunt; Charlotte Perkins Gilman illustrated by Aaron Renier

Nathaniel Hawthorne illustrated by Zack Soto; Poe illustrated by Tom Neely

Jack London illustrated by Michael C. Hsiung; O. Henry illustrated by Kate Bingaman-Burt

These are actual pocket books--3.5 by 5 inches in size, with 32 pages--and really nicely made, from good-quality all-recycled paper. If you've got more brains than me, you'll notice that there's a box set and buy that, rather than buying all of the books individually.

21 Penguins to Start the Year Off Properly

2012-01-02T14:48:00.000-08:00

Let's kick of 2012 with an elegant set of Penguins, shall we? These are the resuscitation of the 'Penguin English Library' series, which will presumably run alongside the Penguin Classics, penguin Popular Classics, Penguin Red Classics, Penguin Pocket Classics and various other ranges, meaning that the one publisher releases 17,235 different versions of some books. (I kid, though only slightly--Penguin Australia has at least 7 different version of Pride and Prejudice in print, for example.)

Anyway, here are the 21 covers from the series which I have found so far, coming out from April this year. They follow the lovely designs Coralie Bickford-Smith made for the Penguin Hardback Classics (see here, for example), and I would not be surprised if they were her work as well. Redundant though the books themselves may be, they've been given a charming and thoughtful series look which allows for a lot of individual variation for each title.

Atticus Books

2011-12-21T14:31:00.000-08:00

Until yesterday I was not even aware that the publisher Atticus Books existed. Then I saw one of the following covers posted here, and was intrigued. Having investigated, I'm glad I did--and I'm also glad that they've only published 10 books so far, as the blurbs/precis for every single one of them makes them sound like my cup of tea. I'm ordering a few of them today.

Anyway, here are a selection of the best covers from the ten books: it's no surprise, given their beauty, to find out that the man behind them is Jamie Keenan.

Vintage Versions [Part 2]

2011-12-15T14:36:00.000-08:00

And after yesterday's spectrum of Vintages, here's a different approach, coming out in March 2012. For this set of 7 books from the Vintage Classics backlist, the publisher has worked together with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as part of the museum's ‘British Design 1948 – 2012: Innovation in the Modern Age’ exhibition.

Vintage have hired seven different well-known designers to do covers for the series. I've been able to get hold of six of them.Missing is John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, with a cover design by milliner Philip Treacy.

Dodie Smith cover by textile designer Celia Birtwell

The only real dud in this lot, designed by Saatchi & Saatchi: it looks a bit as though it took 5 seconds to come up with, and 5 minutes to execute

Ian McEwen design by Wilkinson Eyre Architects

Iris Murdoch cover by fashion designer Zandra Rhodes

Graham Greene design by interior/textile designer Sue Timney


Mark Haddon design by Michael Horsham of Tomato

I would be surprised if this series wasn't at least partly inspired by the Penguin Decades series from last year: Zandra Rhodes was involved in that as well. Oddly enough, her Murdoch design is a somewhat frantic remix of the current cover by Jo Walker.

Vintage Versions [Part 1]

2011-12-14T19:44:00.000-08:00

The first of two posts about Vintage UK redesigns of backlist books, this is a look at the Vintage 21. In celebration of the imprint's 21st birthday, they had 21 of their most popular books printed with text-only covers. More importantly, each of the 21 was printed all in one colour (with some variations of shade)--the front, back, text and even page edges were all matched.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, printed in white, might have seemed drab next to the others, but special extra-bright paper was used to fit it with the rest of the set.

Here are the three which I both did not already own and did want to read.

The effect is very dramatic, especially with several of them together, as you can see. Nobody is credited on the books themselves with the series design, so that must remain a mystery.

Birds & Apocalypses

2011-12-14T14:21:00.000-08:00

In honour of Russell Hoban, who has just passed away, a great author of both adult and children's books, and the man responsible for one of the greatest novels of all time, the post-nuclear-holocaust Riddley Walker, I thought I'd take a look at another avant-garde take on the apocalypse, Adam Novy's The Avian Gospels.

I first came across this via a rave review in Publishers Weekly. It sounded fascinating, and that was before I actually saw the book. Published by Short Flight/Long Drive Books, it's a thing of beauty, taking its cue from the book's title and theme with a very biblical look--most specifically, the little Gideon's you find in hotel rooms.

Designed by Elizabeth Ellen and Aaron Burch, the woman behind SF/LD and the man behind the parent Hobart Pulp, this design splits the book into 2 volumes--a fat 'old testament' and a thin 'new', with gilded page edges, ribbon bookmarks and page reference numbers.

After buying these, I found that everyone who orders them from the publisher gets a free ebook edition too, which is probably a good idea. But if ever you needed a reason to avoid ebooks, it's when the physical alternative is this beautifully considered and produced.

SF/LD seem to specialise in these genre/format-warping exercises: Karl Taro Greenfeld's story collection is disguised as a series of travel guides, while Michelle Orange's travel book is in the format of a passport. This sort of madness is only to be encouraged.

Mendelsund Foucaults

2011-12-08T16:10:00.000-08:00

Synchronicity! A week or so ago, keen-eyed reader Monty Carlo (possibly not his real name) pointed me towards these beautiful covers designed by Peter Mendelsund for the Vintage US covers of Michel Foucault's work. I hadn't seen them: over here in the Commonwealth our Foucaults aren't so striking, as the actress said to the bishop. And then the other day the Casual Optimist lists them as part of his much-delayed best covers of 2010 post. So here they are...

These were even part of the AIGA 50 of 2010, so how I missed them I don't know. Feebleness, presumably.

Matt Taylor's Le Carre's Update (plus Pelham and Wolpe for walls)

2011-12-05T14:26:00.000-08:00

In May I raved about Matt Taylor's wonderful John Le Carre covers for Penguin US. He's produced one more, for January's republication of the classic The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

And here's the un-texted illustration.

Also! Heroes of this blog David Pelham and Berthold Wolpe have some of their celebrated cover designs for Penguin and Faber respectively available as fancy art prints here. If you have any wall space not obscured by jammed bookshelves, how about filling it with some book covers?

Here are the designs: Wolpe's famous text-based covers for Faber, and Pelham's famous A Clockwork Orange and J. G. Ballard covers.

Strangely Familiar

2011-12-01T20:07:00.000-08:00

This has been the series look of Penguin Modern Classics in the UK for several years: bold, dramatic text in Avante Garde Gothic, left-aligned, for both author and title. Instantly recognisible to those of us in the Commonwealth...

..and this is the series look for 'Vigo Essential Classics', yet another charge-for-classics-on-the-Kindle outfit, publishing from June this year, and surely on by coincidence also making use of Penguin's famous shade of orange (which they've been using since the 1930s)...

..and this is the cover for an upcoming book from a (very reputable) publisher of international crime, Bitter Lemon Press...

A question, then--when does this sort of emulation cross the line, given that neither of these covers is a parody of the Penguin design?

Mockery, WITH Covers (and, be warned, breasts)

2011-11-23T18:08:00.000-08:00

There's a certain appeal for many readers in the Mars/Barsoom tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs was no great writer, but he was prolific and, perhaps more importantly, his Martian princess heroine Dejah Thoris spent her entire time naked (Google Image search her name for some of the excitible art this has prompted.). Burroughs also has the advantage of being out of copyright, so anyone who wants to can cash in with reprints of his books. I came across a series of these from Deodand Publishing (I should note here that unlike many publishers of the out-of-copyright, Deodand do not charge ludicrously high prices for their books). The art reminds me of that drawn by heavy metal fans in early high school--more enthusiastic than talented...

There are more effective ways to cash in, of course. Comics company Dynamite is busy adapting the books for comics, and doing their best to squeeze money from idiots by offering various hard-to-find and thus ridiculously expensive "variant covers" (a common way comics companies have to rip off those most eager to be ripped off)--see six of the eight available versions of the first issue...

..and you will notice what Dynamite is pinning their fiscal hopes on, the subtle and sophisticated "risque nude variants", like so...

There's a truly odd cynicism behind this sales ploy, in that even though the books feature the heroine constantly nude, thus actually justifying this sort of objectification (in terms of source fidelity if not in any other way), the actual comics themselves do not feature nudity on the inside pages. Since this is hardly likely to be due to taste or restraint, I can only imagine it's an attempt to be able to sell the non-nude-covered versions of the comics to kids, without creating the sort of moral panic that occasionally occurs when American parents find nipples in their kids' comic books.

Changing the subject entirely, and going back to book covers for a moment, I was surprised by this cover from Dodo Press. Can anyone suggest why Thorne Smith's second supernatural-comedy about Topper and his two friendly ghost friends should end up with Fyodor Dostoevsky on the cover?

At least it's not a risque nude variant.

Not Covers, Just Mockery

2011-11-23T01:28:00.000-08:00

An amusing typo I came across while seeing what is coming out from Oneworld next year. Somebody's not even smart enough to work in data entry at Amazon.

"Ideal conditions for interesting covers": An Interview with Alison Forner

2011-11-21T15:55:00.000-08:00

In discussing the mystifying Australian cover to Stasiland recently, I saw the much better, and appropriate cover designed by Alison Forner for the current US edition (see left). Alison works full-time for the literary Ecco imprint of HarperCollins US, where she has produced some amazing cover designs, including the much-discussed and rightly praised cover for Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood, of which more below.

Alison was kind enough to agree to an interview about her work.

* * *

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: You were a professional dancer and a poet before becoming a designer. How did this transition happen? And looking back, how planned has your designing career been?

ALISON FORNER: I suppose you could say my design career wasn't planned at all. I had always taken studio art classes from the time I was a young child through high school, but training for a dance career doesn't leave much time for other serious pursuits. So I guess you could say the ability was always there, but never fully explored because I was always dancing.

Ultimately, what led me to design was a gradual falling away of my creative interests. Dancing was getting harder and harder on my knees (ballet and modern dance are not kind to the body) and my writing group was dissolving as everyone left New York to attend MFA programs. I was convinced I could continue writing without my group, and had early encouragement from Gordon Lish, then publisher of The Quarterly literary magazine, when he accepted several poems for publication when I was 22. Sadly, The Quarterly lost funding and folded before I could see them in print (although I think I still have page proofs somewhere!), and I completely lost steam. And so without writing or dancing, I was left with my print production job at Random House, which I loved for different reasons, but which left me without a meaningful creative outlet.

After some serious flailing, I took a "Quark for Production Managers" class given by a colleague, and it was then that I realized I wanted to be a designer. We were creating fake book covers in order to understand the entire production process, and I was so engrossed in designing my fake cover that I completely lost track of what was being taught. I was hooked! I decided the next day to start taking design classes at Parsons. I continued with night classes for several years until I built a presentable portfolio (with a focus on cover design). I started doing some freelance work for Random House, then eventually landed my current job at Ecco.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Do you work full-time at Ecco now, or do you still do freelance work?

ALISON FORNER: Yes, I'm full-time at Ecco, but I also do freelance work. I love my freelance clients--the process is very different from working with an in-house team, but just as rewarding. I've learned so much from this aspect of my career. Some of my clients don't have in-house art directors, so I end up playing both designer and director (and sometimes even production manager).

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: In a literary-oriented press like Ecco, where covers don't have to match a certain commercial look, how much room is there for making use of unusual design ideas?

ALISON FORNER: At Ecco we're lucky to have an amazing publisher, Dan Halpern [also a successful poet], who encourages and appreciates creative thinking. It's a pleasure designing covers here; we have a fantastic list of books that don't always fit into a perfect mold. Ideal conditions for interesting covers!

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: I'm interested in how a cover like yours for The Interrogative Mood comes to be: was it your idea to leave the title and author off the front? And how much of a battle was it to get that idea accepted?

ALISON FORNER: I love how that jacket has inspired so much curiosity--as only a book of questions should! Again, I need to mention our publisher Dan who saw the imagery I created and knew immediately that we should leave it as is. Interrogative Mood is such an unusual and wonderful book--it really did beg for its own unique visual treatment. And it managed to sail through the approval process without a hitch. Strange, but true!

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Have you ever been asked to design/cover/illustrate a book you couldn't stand? I'm not asking you to name names, I'm just interested in the process of aesthetically representing something you don't feel any sympathy for.

ALISON FORNER: I will answer this in very hushed tones... yes, I have. But I won't reveal which ones! It certainly makes the design process harder--I think it's always easier to work on something you feel passionate about. But there are so many things that can inspire visuals--whether it's a really compelling title, subtitle, subject matter, you-name it. So disliking something doesn't always lead to a dearth of ideas. It's really our job and challenge as designers to create something worthwhile despite our personal opinions.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Is there any neglected book you'd like to draw to the attention of readers?

ALISON FORNER: Can I recommend a somewhat neglected form of writing? How about giving poetry some love? Poems are perfect for our dwindling attention spans. They're not scary! Just tiny and compact. And they pack a punch. I suggest starting with one per day and seeing where that takes you. I think we're all so programmed now to skim instead of read; poetry forces you to slow down, pay attention, and let your imagination take over. Now doesn't that sound like fun?

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: It definitely does. Thank you, Ms Forner!

Alison's site also includes some beautiful covers that never got used for one reason or another. Here are a few to whet your appetitie. See the rest here.

Books vs Keira Knightley Part III

2011-11-10T16:16:00.000-08:00

Here she is again: this time she's playing Sabina Spielrein, and thus yet again a real person is pushed off the front of the cover of a book about them (or in this case, three real people get shafted).

So here's the Keira Knightley library so far. I note that she's also starring in a film version of Anna Karenina coming out next year, so this collection will be expanding soon.

In time, every woman in literature and history will have been played by Keira Knightley.

Connections

2011-11-09T15:10:00.000-08:00

A recent book which I've ordered and am impatiently awaiting is Craig Brown's One on One. It's one of those simple ideas that nobody had ever come up with until now: a collection of 101 true stories of often unlikely meetings, where each meeting leads on to the next (thus Adolf Hitler is almost killed when John Scott-Ellis hits him with his car in 1931; Scott-Eliis also met Rudyard Kipling; Kipling met Mark Twain, who had an odd encounter with Helen Keller, and so on, looping all the way round to Hitler again at the end). And just for the hell of it, each encounter is described in 1001 words.

How to create a cover for such a complex cast of characters? Well, why not put them all on it, with their connections?

Click to make readable

Very nice indeed. ~~I don't know who to credit, though, since there is no designer listed on the scan of the dustjacket which I've been able to get hold of~~. The design is by Jo Walker.

Habibi

2011-11-08T16:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I finally got around the reading the latest comics world sensation, the near-700-page Habibi, by Craig Thompson. I enjoyed it, though I had some strong reservations about a number of its elements. For a much more thorough discussion of its successes and failings, see this extensive and discursive discussion at The Comics Journal. One area in which the book undoubtedly does succeed is in its design, all Thompson's work, and which I want to show off here (mine is the UK Faber edition, though I believe it's pretty much identical to the US Pantheon edition). Click on any image for a much larger version.

Front endpapers

Chapter title page

A whole mess of internal page spreads

Back endpapers

I also appreciate the fact that the ISBN, barcode and blurb is on a removable slip of paper, and so don't disfigure the back cover.

If She Could Just Meet the Man by the Fence...

2011-11-03T15:00:00.000-07:00

Another case of an image proliferating across all the book covers in the world, much like the man by the fence. This time it's a photo by Lorraine Molina of a woman holding a birdcage (though sometimes her birdcage has been Photoshopped away). Thanks to the sharp-eyed emailer who drew my attention to several of these instances, inspired by my talking about John Crowley.

And this is the original photo...

Me, Elsewhere, Rabbiting On

2011-10-30T16:58:00.000-07:00

Today is Halloween, a celebration that goes mostly ignored here in Australia. People tend to divide into 3 groups here:

1. Those who ignore it

2. Random kids who go trick-or-treating, and are mostly disappointed because those in group 1 have no treats to hand over.

3. Those who go into splenetic rants about American cultural imperialism whenever it's mentioned.

In any case, over at The Second Pass, I'm one of a number of persons talking about great scary short stories; to my delight, I find myself in the company of John Crowley, one of my favourite writers. Hot-diggetty, as the cool kids say. The story I chose is from the John Wyndham oddity, The Outward Urge.

If I hadn't, mistakenly, been convinced someone else would choose it, I might also have gone for Guy de Maupassant's 'The Horla': go here for details, online texts thereof, and even a Peter Lorre-starring radio play version.

Or go here and here for my ludicrously extensive John Wyndham covers posts.

The Most Popular Fence in Literature

2011-10-27T18:05:00.000-07:00

There's a man who always lurks by the same fence in the same pose, every day, always the same... except that sometimes he changes his hat.

WTF GDR?

2011-10-26T16:57:00.000-07:00

I just readAnna Funder's most excellent Stasiland, only 9 years after everybody else. But for the life of me I cannot make sense of the cover of the Australian (and first) edition. The book is about life under the all-encompassing surveillance of the East German secret police and their vast network of informers. The cover is a cold-looking woman wearing a glittery top. I don't know what it is meant to represent, and it's really bugging me. Does anyone have any ideas?

Vexed

2011-10-19T18:33:00.000-07:00

Am I alone in finding this poll on Random House Australia's website both ludicrous and infuriating in multiple ways?

And here's another ludicrous attempt to cash in on the classics, via the use of RANDOM CLASSIC PAINTED NUDE WOMEN on unrelated book covers, from "Vexin Classics".

The Monster's complaints of being ugly and unloved were strangely unconvincing

The musketeers were Athos, Porthos and Miss July

Elizabeth went to unexpected lengths to get Fitzwilliam Darcy's attention

Hucks's biggest adventure involved some surgery and hormone injections

"Just shut up and dance, Friday!"

There were more titles in this series, with similarly misleading covers (including some designed to appeal to the ladies), though they seem to have been deleted from sale. I can't imagine why...

Romantic Fabers

2011-10-17T15:41:00.000-07:00

Having recently not liked a set of Faber reissues, it's pleasing to be able to commend F&F for a different set of books: collections of selected poems by the great Romantics, with beautiful woodcut-style covers and endpapers designed by various contemporary artists. I'm not sure which artists are responsible for which boioks, but the whole project was directed by Faber senior designer Miriam Rosenbloom.

Some of these images pinched from Design Sponge, where I first came across these covers.

Tyger!

White China

2011-10-10T21:55:00.000-07:00

With china being the traditional 20th anniversary gift, British publishers Orion have decided to commemorate their two decades next year by commissioning sculptor Ben Twiston-Davies to create new sculptures representing 20 of their books; sculptures which have then been carefully photographed against white backgrounds and given minimalist text treatments. The results are quite lovely, as I hope you can see from the 10 covers I've scrounged together show.

I just wish that some of the books themselves were more deserving of this beautiful treatment. Orion may claim that "Award-winning, ground-breaking, genre-defining, blockbusting, [...] they’re the very best in publishing," but the likes of Dave Pelzer should be kept out of print, not celebrated. And the Horrid Henry cover looks unfortunately like this Tutis classic...

If Henry's doing what I think he's doing, then he really is horrid.

Finnegening

2011-10-10T18:43:00.000-07:00

Another forthcoming (April 2012, supposedly) hardback Penguin Classic is the "restored" Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. I don't know who is responsible, but I really like the cover.

It's also striking because it really stands out from the books many previous covers, almost all of which are quite boring, and not at all representative of the book's wilfully obscurantist playfulness. For the most part they tend to be either plain text, or to just have a picture of Joyce stuck on there.

Tutis Has a Rival

2011-10-10T17:24:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since anti-geniuses Tutis released a book, so I haven't had the chance to mock them. However, Brian Busby and Bookride have had a bit of a look at Alphascript and Betascript, a German-based print-on-demand publisher of tens of thousands apparently randomly packaged Wikipedia articles (all at great expense: would you like a bound copy of the 487-word article on the Pet Shop Boys single 'One More Chance'? It's yours for US$54!). What's especially wonderful about these books, which I assume are produced with little or no human involvement, is that most of them come with various other, often unrelated, articles jammed in to bloat the page count, and the covers seem to have been similarly designed without heed to sense or relevance.

Here are some examples...

Conscription really did pull in some terribly young soldiers

Young Conservative

Lithuanian nobles like comfy chairs as much as everyone else

If this is was Brazilian spy's idea of field research, I can't say I'm surprised the agency was disbanded.

It's always a sign of publishing quality when you steal a watermarked photo for your book cover

It took 3 editors to put the wrong building on the cover of this book.

The politics of Egypt are surprisingly London-centric

Domingo was always wrecking 'Three Tenors' concerts by doing sax solos.

Australian government outsourcing scandal!

It goes underwater if you leave the cargo bay doors open.

To be fair, she really doesn't look very aggressive.

I just... what.. hang on...

They're just really excited about dangerous, toxic carbon fuel schemes

He/she looks good for his/her age.

Though the 1790s were a horribly racist time, all credit to the Marylebone Cricket Club for letting a underage black girl play for them in the 1790s. Of course, they did use the cunning ploy of calling her 'Robert' so that the half-blind imperialists in the audience would be fooled into thinking she was just another white man with amusing facial hair.

Both naval vessels and hands can carry guns--near enough.

This image is actually probably more apropriate than was intended.

Fucking European cultural imperialism, keeping all of the Bangladeshi debaters out of their own federation

This is a book about a single from a Swedish death metal band. That is a picture of some pretty flowers.

I consulted the Wikipedia article for the 'rear of the Year' competition to see how the two other articles were connected, but I still remain in a state of pure, blessed ignorance. However, it was gratifying to learn that 'There is only one, genuine, Rear of the Year award and a list of contenders is never supplied to bookmakers so that their suppositions about the outcome are pure conjecture.' Take that, Swedish Academy!

Mosaics

2011-10-06T18:43:00.000-07:00

I'll be back properly next week, but in the meantime, via the blog of the excellent Peter Mendelsund (who I interviewed here), see these lovely mosaical covers for Stephen Jay Gould (by Sam Potts for Harvard University Press)...

That gap in the design will be filled by future volumes

and for some of the work of Clarice Lispector (I've only read The Hour of the Star, which was excellent, so here's an opportunity to read more) using a striking photo of her when young (covers by Paul Sahre for New Directions).

Here's the original photo:

Apologies for the Delay

2011-09-28T00:46:00.000-07:00

I'm on holiday for the moment--back soon.

Mohr Creepiness

2011-09-22T01:39:00.000-07:00

Over the last week I've read two novels from a new-to-me publisher, Canada's ChiZine Publications, who specialise in "dark literary fiction", ie well-written horror and fantasy. Horror is not usually my bag, partly because I quickly tire of supernatural stories unless they're tremendously well-written--I need it to be scientifically rationalised horror, ie Alien or The Thing rather than Stephen King nonsense. Of the two, David Nicle's Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism, a tale of eugenics, forced sterilisation and parasitic lifeforms, was excellent, while Tony Burgess's People Live Still in Cashtown Corners, while well-written, was ultimately mystifying and unsatisfying (the second book by him I've found to be so, despite his excellent script for the blackly comic language-as-disease movie Pontypool).

But what of the covers? Well, all of ChiZine's cover design work is by Erik Mohr, sometimes working with Corey Beep. As you can see below, they've produced some wonderful designs. Indeed, it was Eutopia's cover that first grabbed me...

..that girl's eyes being both completely black and spot-varnished, so that tiny beads of light catch on them and follow you around as you move the book. Look at that expression: you just know she's hiding a set of fangs behind that pursed mouth.

Other ChiZine covers I particularly like:

Fuckity-Doo-Dah

2011-09-15T19:45:00.000-07:00

Another quick post that's really a link to more thorough content elsewhere: Brandon Duncan has, over at his site Corporate Demon Blog, posted a thorough and fascinating look at the background to a cover design: in this case, the marvellously titled The Fuckness. Have a look.

And here's another Duncan cover design for the same author:

I suspect that Mr Prunty is not completely at peace with his fellow man.

Richard Merritt Follow-Up

2011-09-14T17:59:00.000-07:00

When I posted about the striking new Vintage Classic Nancy Mitfords recently, I didn't know the designer until the art director of those covers showed up to let me know: they were the work of Richard Merritt. Looking through his other work was very interesting, as I would never have guessed that the creator of these covers was the same as the creator of his previous book covers. This is not a criticism, by the way--it's just that the delicate and subtle Mitford images are quite different from the colourful, dynamic and cartoonish work, full of odd angles and detail bursting out of the frame, that he has done elsewhere. It's intriguing to see such a difference in styles, and make sme want to know what else he'll come up with in the future.

Compare:

versus:

(The last two being picture books Merritt wrote and illustrated--and, indeed, where are Santa's pants?)

Electrified Sexual Positions on a Sinking Ship

2011-09-11T17:02:00.000-07:00

Some nice covers revealed in Penguin CLassics US's catalogue for early 2012...

Malika Favre's picto-porno-typographic cover for the Deluxe Classics edition of Vatsyayana's Kama Sutra, which I imagine will wrap all the way round the back and onto the French flaps. The red slashes of the gloves and stockings are the perfect extra element which makes this, I think.

See also Favre's rather more Sapphic variation on this, from her site (click for a bigger version, as the actress said to the bishop):

Then there's Max Ellis's cutaway cover for Titanic, First Accounts, another Deluxe Classics also making full use of the flaps. Here's the front and the full fold-out cover (sorry for the low-res version of the latter, but it's all I could find).

Here's a Max Ellis alphabet, vegetable in theme:

And finally, designer unknown, this simple but eye-catching cover for the great Nikola Tesla's autobiography, using the best handsome-devil photo of him that I know of.

Bonus content: The Doctor Who theme played on twin Tesla coils...

..and this great photo of Mark Twain in Tesla's lab, 1894...

Long Story Shorts

2011-09-07T01:56:00.000-07:00

There's an Australian designer who has done some wonderful covers recently, and who I'm ashamed to say I'd not heard of until I read the excellent interview he gave to Óscar Palmer at his site Cultura Impopular. His name is Dean Gorissen. I urge you to go there to read it, and here's why: the six covers he designed for Australian press Affirm, the 'Long Story Shorts' collections of short stories by emerging Australian writers. Click for bigger versions.

Big Box of Beckett

2011-09-01T16:28:00.000-07:00

Having recently seen Beckett performed live for the first time, I wanted to read some more of his work. Looking around for a good collection of his plays, I came across something even better: a glorious big box of his novels, plays, stories, poems and criticism. Me being me, I could not resist. Plus, it does the one image, many spines thing, with that magnificently craggy face, like Abraham lincoln after a big night on the tiles. (Click for bigger images)

The individual volumes are nicely designed, too--though, weirdly, the back covers are more impressive than the fronts. I suppose the unflashy fronts fit Beckett's whole minimal staging ethos.

Here's what's in the box, by the way:

The design was done by Laura Lindgren for publishers Grove Press.

UPDATE: The original hardcover version of this set does use those images on the front covers of the books, so there you go!

Sepia Mitfords

2011-08-24T20:24:00.000-07:00

Forthcoming from Vintage Classics, a reissuing of Nancy Mitford's four biographies of famous persons, with rather ace matching covers. All use limited sepia-toned palettes, silhouettes and lovingly detailed patterns. ~~I wish I knew who had done these.~~ [UPDATE: They are the work of Richard Merritt] My only concern is that the usual red spines of the Vintage Classics series will look a bit glarey here--perhaps they could make an exception and do them in a rich chocolatey brown?

Click for somewhat bigger versions.

Faber Faces Front

2011-08-24T20:14:00.000-07:00

These came out in early July, but I only just saw them for the first time in an Australian bookshop. They're a set of reissues from the Faber & Faber backlist, the 'Secrets and Lies' collection, each of which uses a big photo of a face for the cover. I'm not sure why, but they don't quite work for me. Perhaps it's that, though many of these are historical novels, the photos themselves look so new--though why this should bother me, I don't know. So much for intelligent criticism. They are, however, a welcome change from the usual headless cropped photos on book covers.

Skottie Young's Oz

2011-08-17T21:43:00.000-07:00

I've never read a comics adaption of a book: it seems somehow redundant, even though I really like a whole heap of different comics. Any why should a comic version of a book be any more redundant than a movie adaption? Well, this is an argument with myself to be continued at another time. What I'm getting around to is the wonderful work of comics artist Skottie Young, who for several years has been producing wonderful covers for a series of comic adaptions of Frank Baum's Oz books.

These covers (shown here sans the various corporate logos, barcodes and other elements which usually disfigure comic covers) are really something special: funny, off-kilter, sometimes disturbing, and wonderfully energetic. Click all for much bigger versions.

For The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:

For Ozma of Oz:

From The Marvellous Land of Oz:

And from the current Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz:

And for bonus excellence, have a couple of illustrations he's done for Austen's Sense and Sensibility...

..and Golding's Lord of the Flies.

Vaulting

2011-08-17T20:31:00.000-07:00

Current reading is David Rose's The Vault: An Anti-Novel (the subtitle coming from the fact that part of the book is a novel, and part is the annoyed commentary from the man whose life story inspired the novel). It's really good!

I bought it on the strength of a very positive review that I now can't find, and am very glad I did. This is true even though a lot of it concerns sports (competitive cycling, in this case), and the world of sports is not just a closed book to me, but a closed book locked in a safe, sealed in concrete and sunk in a pit of toxic waste. Fortunately, it also concerns sniping and nuclear espionage, among other things.

The cover is a lovely bit of work by the great David Pearson: it doesn't attempt to graphically represent anything from the story: it just uses text and simple shapes to seize the eyeballs.

"It's like it's on fire!"

2011-08-11T16:15:00.000-07:00

Posted on Peter Mendelsund's blog:

I have no idea if this is the actual final cover (the book's not out until January), whether Peter was the designer, or how many layers of jacket were required to create that effect, but I love it and want it NOW!

(For my interview with Peter, see here.)

Virginia Woolfs

2011-08-04T22:55:00.000-07:00

Another set of Penguin Hardback Modern Classics, following on from these lovely Fitzgeralds, is this forthcoming set of five Virginia Woolfs. Designer and artist as yet unknown. I assume the artwork will wrap all the way around the back and onto the flaps. Click to embiggen.

Covers That Aren't But Ought To Be 2

2011-08-04T19:32:00.000-07:00

UK-based illustrator and designer Neil Webb has done several published covers, like this for Portobello books...

..but I also really like these speculative covers he's done:

Click for bigger versions.

Fake Faber

2011-08-03T17:02:00.000-07:00

A bit of an odd case this time round, with a cover noted by Welsh correspondent Miss Disco. A newish collection of Welsh poets from Parthian Press is deliberately aping the look of 1980s-era Faber & Faber poetry covers, even down to using Albertus (the font designed especially for Faber by Berthold Wolpe*), and mimicking the repeating publisher's logo in the background.

Cover design by Lucy Llewellyn

Compare this with the Fabers...

This is the first time I've seen this overt tribute/mimickry applied to a non-Penguin classic design.

* Although, as it turns out, Faber did not use Albertus for those covers...

Super, and Not-So-Super

2011-07-27T16:31:00.000-07:00

The new, and typically half-thoughtful/half-drug-fucked, book by frequently amazing Scottish comics writer Grant Morrison is Supergods, a look at the history and philosophy of superheroes--something he knows a lot about, having written acclaimed runs of Superman, Batman and X-Men, among others. (My own personal favourite among his works is his Doom Patrol series--a funny but ultimately sad, surrealistic take on superheroic cliches--and its long-lost offshoot, Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery.)

Anyway, to Supergods. Here's the excellent US cover:

This uses the artwork by Frank Quitely from page one of Morrison's All-Star Superman series. Most comics (and movies) which retell the beginnings of various superheroes do so at wearisome length. Morrison knew that everyone reading a Superman comic already knew those basics, and summed them up in one page and four panels, getting it out of the way so that the fun stuff could start.

Click for bigger version

And here's the UK cover.

I can see why people are spending extra to import the US version.

Next post: an uncanny similarity spotted by Welsh correspondent Miss Disco.

Big Head

2011-07-26T15:46:00.000-07:00

Here's a beautiful set of covers for the work of Oliver Sacks, from Vintage US. The designs are by Cardon Webb. Click for enbiggening.

(seen first at John Gall's blog)

"I'm looking for a book with a naked woman lying down on the cover..."

2011-07-21T17:06:00.000-07:00

There's a certain kind of crime writer (with an associated kind of crime reader) that I sold a lot of when I worked in a bookshop. The writer produces formulaic books with non-specific titles at tremendous speed, and the readers gobble them up and forget them half an hour later. Looking through the crime shelves, said readers are unable to remember which ones they've read, and the covers, titles and blurbs do nothing to help, since they're all basically the same. I've never seen such determination to keep producing basically the same book, though, as shown by the designers at Bantam for the work of Tess Gerritsen.

This cover was also discussed in this post, as it's a lookalike.

Lots of sleepy naked chicks in Gerritsen-land.

Caustic Cover Critic Considers Canongate Canons

2011-07-18T17:23:00.000-07:00

Another repackaging-of-classics exercise is the imminent set of 12 (though I can only find 11) 'Canons' from Scottish publisher Canongate. They look rather nice: I like the use of white space, and the way that the cover image in every case is almost but not quite obliterated, leaving just enough visible to make it clear what you're looking at. It's especially effective given the nature of the books chosen--there's nothing much in common there other than the publisher, but this group identity works for all of them, I think.

The Spark Collected Sories was actually also announced as a forthcoming Penguin Modern Classic this year, but has quietly vanished from the Penguin line-up. I wonder what conversation took place when somebody suddenly realised that they didn't actually have the rights...

By the way, I need to say that I miss the old Canongate Classics: a huge variety of great Scottish literary works that have mostly gone out of print now that Canongate seem focused on international fiction. I guess they were a money-loser, but it's always a shame when neglected-then-resurrected books that deserve to be read end up becoming neglected again (see also most of what used to be available as Virago Modern Classics).

The Dead School

2011-07-14T17:14:00.000-07:00

Forthcoming from NYRB, The Letter Killers Club, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (about whose amazing Memories of the Future I wrote here):

I don't know who took the photo on the cover, but I recognise what it's a photo of: a school in Pripyat, a city abandoned when the area was contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident in 1986. See these other photos of the same schoolroom:

Visit those three flickr albums above for more amazing and creepy photos from the abandoned city. As you might imagine from my obsession with nuclear disaster, I can't stop thinking about these pictures.

Triplicate and Duplicate

2011-07-13T17:49:00.000-07:00

With thanks to eagle-eyed reader Peter Herpich, a trio of matching covers (all using Edward Hopper's 'Rooms by the Sea' (1951))...

[UPDATE: And avisannschild has found another...

]

..and another pair I've spotted, using what I think is an old 'Vogue' photo.

Breaking Down The Beginners

2011-07-11T22:08:00.000-07:00

I'm currently halfway through Rebecca Wolff's much-praised first novel (after several poetry collections), The Beginners. It's a book I'm enjoying, though it has a few flaws: describing a dream on pages 1 and 2 is a risky start (I'm with Henry James -- "Tell a dream, lose a reader."), and it needs better editing (one character's clothes change mid-scene for no reason--see pages 3 and 24), but it's also pretty absorbing, packing a heady charge of summer heat, adolescent female sexuality and the ghosts of witchcraft.

The cover design is gorgeous; it's the work of Helen Yentus and Ben Wiseman.

You need to see it to get the full effect: it's a black-and-white engraving ('The Cat and the Fox' by Gustave Doré, an illustration for the fable by La Fontaine) overprinted in gold on a photograph by Nancy Honey--a photo which calls to mind both the dunking method for finding witches and the swimming sessions undertaken by the book's teenagers in their local reservoir (under which lie the ruins of three drowned towns). Click for much bigger versions of each.

Weird Similarity...

2011-07-07T15:36:00.000-07:00

A weird similarity:

The excellent cover to Steve Holden's Somebody to Love (about a transgender funeral parlour worker), published in October 2010...

The sleeve to a Simian Mobile Disco single released in November 2010...

Given production lag-times, it seems impossible for the record sleeve to be a copy of the book cover: just a weird coincidence.

UPDATE: Wise reader Emily points me to this interview with book designer Clare Skeats where she talks about both covers and the inspirations behind them.

Tipped Over

2011-07-06T16:27:00.000-07:00

This post is on a topic that I find a bit mystifying. In what seems to be an attemt to fight the rising ebook tide, Hodder has published a series of what they call 'flipbacks'. They say they're "something completely original, a perfectly formed, portable, pocket-sized treat", and that they licensed the design from the Dutch publisher who invented them.

They seem to be like normal books turned on their side, and printed on what I assume to be very thin Gideon's-Bible-style paper--hardly a patentable revolution, I would have thought. Has anyone seen one of these in the wild? Is that all there is to them? Wouldn't turning pages up, calendar-wise, be a bit irritating?

And there seems to have been a missed opportunity for cover art here--they've just taken the existing covers and recropped them...

..when they could have done something new with the landscape format, perhaps along the lines of these movie-still James M. Cain covers.

If you've seen on or, even better, read one, please leave a comment and tell me what I'm missing here.

Grimm

2011-06-29T17:11:00.000-07:00

I got the latest Taschen catalogue last night, full of their usual mix of high art and ridiculously exensive porn. I assume there's someone out there who thinks $69.95 is a reasonable sum to spend on a book of photos of Kate Moss, but I hope my life never intersects with theirs. However, one book in there that I do need to own is Noel Daniel's upcoming fancy-pants edition of The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.

What Daniel has done is comb through 150 years of different Grimm editions and translations from all over the wrld, and chosen the best illustrations for the best stories, presenting them all together in one big book. It's a great idea which, like many ideas, I'm amazed nobody had before*.

Some innards:

This is also as good a time as any to post one of my other favourite covers, a sexy and ornate interpretation by Vania (or Ivan) Zouravliov for Vintage Classics.

* My own great ideas are never so great. The other night, waking up at 2am, I had what seemed at the time a bolt of inspiration: start a Tumblr called 'Books' Ends: The Last Word in Great Books', and each day I would post the last word from a great book, somehow revealing the natures of said books and their authors through their well-chosen final words. I have not yet done this, because the world doesn't really need another pointless Tumblr blog, but I'm still tempted.

Covers That Aren't But Ought To Be 1

2011-06-28T16:33:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I come across, or have brought to my attention, speculative cover designs that artists and designers have done for themselves. They're not published, and there are no plans for them to be, but they're easily good enough to be used. In an attempt to show these covers off, and maybe get some publishers looking at new work that would make their books look fantastic, here's the first in an irregular series of posts showcasing Covers That Aren't But Ought To Be.

The following are all the work of Andrew Barron. His portfolio is here. The Penguin branding is just to show what the final books might look like--unfortunately, these editions are not available in the real world, as I found to my disappointment after peering at tiny ISBNs and searching online catalogues. Click all for bigger versions.

The 'American Giants':

Garcia Marquez:

The Iliad, cover design and internal artwork:

Suskind:

Burroughs:

And finally, a book that does exist, but in an incredibly limited edition, The Job, a book Barron created and designed that was inspired by Burroughs's cut-up novels.

Marvellous stuff, and I really, really want that Iliad to exist, so that I can have a copy.

Evergreens

2011-06-23T18:50:00.000-07:00

If you're reading this, I may have (temporarily at least) tamed Firefox and its woes. So let's look at some pretty books I've stumbled across. They're from Penguin's Indian arm, and that company has done their damnedest to hide them on their website. They're named the Evergreens, and they're designed as the Subcontinental answer to the various Great Ideas/Journeys/Food series Penguin UK has produced over the last few years. Like the Great ideas, the cover designs have been limited to a palette of black and orange.

I'm going to try to get hold of some of these--before postage, they work out to about $2 Australian each. However, even in this day and age, though, ordering books from India is not the easiest thing. It can have its rewards: one bookshop sent my parcel of books wrapped in muslin and sealed with wax, which had a pleasantly vibe of antiquity to it that you don't normally get when you order stuff online.

French Sophistication

2011-06-21T16:39:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of posts: a virus scan wrecked my Windows installation, and in fixing that my browser seems to have gone haywire, meaning any attempts to upload an image to this blog make the whole thing crash--a bit of a problem for a blog based on pictures. Describing the book covers without images isn't quite the same.

To show that I'm not dead, I'm surreptitiously posting this brief thing from my workplace. Please enjoy this tasteful French book cover from 1974 (taken from here, a blog full of this sort of thing).

Click for bigger--if you dare! More Opta here, though sadly none quite so tacky as this.

Open

2011-06-15T18:25:00.000-07:00

Another wonderfully Quixotic literary outfit is Open Letter Books, based at the University of Rochester. They publish only translations, bringing some of the most wonderful books you've never heard of into the English language. I've only read a few of their offerings so far, but they have all been excellent. And the covers! Designed by several talented artists (Milan Bozic (who also did these beauties) and editor E. J. Van Lanen among them), they have those bold areas of colour and simple but not straightforward cover designs that bring to mind other wonderful publishers of the exotic like Dalkey and New Directions. Many of them have a timeless feel--they could have been produced at any point in the last 70 years.

"The unpleasant, acrid smell of burnt poetry."

2011-06-06T15:48:00.000-07:00

Will Schofield of the ever- and increasingly amazing 50 Watts pointed me towards this new work by the marvellous Tomer Hanuka, who I interviewed here.

Click for much bigger versions of this and all other Wodehouse covers below

It's part of a set of six new Wodehouse covers imminent from Norton in the US, each designed by a different artist.

Cover by Alessandro Gottardo

Cover by Antony Hare

Cover by John Hendrix

Cover by Jonathan Bartlett

Cover by Lilli Carré, about whom much more here

For a convoluted look back at the history of P. G. Wodehouse covers, see this post, and for the least appropriate Wodehouse cover ever (which also gets his name wrong), see the end of this post.

Speaking of Tomer Hanuka, he has also done two more John O'Hara covers for Vintage Classics UK (his frst two are shown here).

And finally, speaking of 50 Watts, you HAVE to look at the winners of the design-a-book-cover-in-a-Polish-style competition. This was inspired by the book 1000 Polish Book Covers, an amazing thing I will be posting about as soon as I get my copy.

Notting Hill Editions

2011-06-01T19:14:00.000-07:00

Anyone launching a new publishing company focusing on physical books gets a big hug from me these days. When the publisher is someone like Notting Hill Editions, that hug becomes so suffocating and bear-like that everyone feels awkward and then has trouble making eye-contact afterwards. But enough of this over-extended metaphor: look to the books!

Notting Hill have dedicated themselves to producing slimmish but book-length pieces of non-fiction, both new works and forgotten classics. The production values on their books are superb--stamped jacketless linen covers, sewn bindings, and two-colour internal printing with red ink used for chapter-opening drop capitals, page numbers and flourishes on the running headers.

Several of the many, MANY, MANY future-of-the-book-in-the-face-of-ebooks pieces that have been cropping up in newspapers and online recently have mentioned that the way for physical books to survive in the future may be for them to be beautifully made objects. Notting Hill Editions are doing this just right--the look and feel of their books remind me of the precepts set out by master printer/typographer Daniel Berkeley Updike in his lovely The Well-Made Book.

As you can see, most of the books make use of text-only covers...

..although the John Berger essay, Cataract, is illustrated inside and out by Selçuk Demirel.

So, fascinating books in lovely bodies. What more could you ask for, really?

"There is a shortage of perfect breasts in this world; 'twould be a pity to damage yours."*

2011-05-30T19:07:00.000-07:00

Here's a wonderful submission in the awful and inappropriate cover category from Amie-June Brumble. I'll let her tell the tale:

You're probably familiar with the story of The Princess Bride, either in book or movie form. Fairy tale romance, a princess, a dashing pirate, etc. I knew the story mostly from the much-loved '80s film with Wallace Shawn and Andre the Giant. Recently, I decided to pick up a copy of the book, and went to my local glorious bookstore (Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA). I found two or three copies of the usual cover, showing Buttercup and Wesley running, and...this!

It utterly astounds me the cover image for this fairy tale manages to make it look like horror/tentacle porn.

Naturally, I bought it. It's one of the tackiest things I own. Fun pastime: cover up the title of the book with your hand, show it to people, and ask them what book they think it is. The responses you get are very interesting.

And here's the cover in question:

Ballantine Books has done themselves proud! The artwork is by Esteban Maroto, and I have no idea if it was actually done for this book, or just grabbed from the files as a case of 'It's a fantasy book, this will do!'. Maroto is a Spanish comics artist whose best-known work is a mix of psychedelic 1970s trippiness and sex. Here are a couple of random pages from two different comics by him to give you the idea--click for bigger versions. (Full comics and more Marotoana are to be found here)

* It's from the book, chapter 8--it seemed too appropriate not to use.

Soft Skull in Deep Focus: The Sequel

2011-05-25T23:01:00.000-07:00

Some more covers have emerged for the Soft Skull Press 'Deep Focus' series, in which writers look at length about the sort of classic films that tend to be ignored by more highbrow critics. Here are the three I've previously posted...

..and here are the next three in the series (the Lethal Weapon cover was shown before, but has now changed).

I now know the designer: it's Spacesick (possibly not his real name), who was responsible for (and probably hired on the strength of) his very clever 'I Can Read Movies' series of films-as-book-covers (see the full set here).

Caustic Kindle Critic Follow-Up

2011-05-25T16:13:00.000-07:00

In the comments to a recent post mocking awful ebook covers, the sharp-eyed Craig D. directed me to this Sherlock Holmes ebook, featuring the cutest, least threatening Hound of the Baskervilles ever seen.

The same publisher also has these two unlikely covers on their list.

As inapt as these 3 covers are, at least this publisher releases their public domain ebooks at no cost, so more power to them!

Chatterley Bonanza

2011-05-18T18:30:00.000-07:00

D. H. Lawrence and his Lady Chatterley's Lover has cropped up quite a bit round here recently. I thought it might be entertaining to look at some of the current and past covers for this famous book (often famous for the wrong reasons). The two opening images here are lithograhs (by a Peter Schem?) from a 1956 French edition.

Let's start with the mind-addling variety of editions currently in print from Penguin...

The 50th anniversary edition from last year

The standard Penguin Classics edition, with art by Aaron Robinson (see here)

The current Penguin Essentials edition with art by Lucy McLauchlan (see here)

The Penguin Graphic Classics edition, with art from Chester Brown (click for much bigger version)

The Penguin Hardback Classics edition, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith (interviewed here)

The Popular Penguins edition

Six different versions of one book in print from the one publisher? Not weird at all.

Then there are Penguin's various past editions, some of which are...

Popular Classics edition, 1990s


Various Penguin 20th Century Classics editions, late 1980s to mid-1990s

Penguin US, 1948

Film tie-in

Penguin, 1960

Penguin, 1978, photo by fashion/erotica photographer Harri Peccinotti (thanks, Gould!)

Penguin, 1980

Penguin Designer Classic by Paul Smith, 2006

Essential Penguin, 1990s

Penguin Modern Classic, early 2000s

Penguin US, 1946

Then there's the new edition from Vintage Classics, with a photo by Carla van de Puttelaar (see here for more)...

Some of you may remember a couple of awful ebook covers for other Lawrence novels. You'll be thrilled to know that the same company now has a Lady Chatterley edition to match, with Lady C and Mellors rather unexpectedly getting it on in an empty theatre.

This is not the only shitty ebook version out there. For example...

Mellors's smooth moods were her only distraction from the rising damp from Alpha Centauri

Wiped, but left toilet paper between buttocks

But let's get back to physical books from the past, both in English and not...

Ace, 1958: the erotic possibilities of a well-trimmed lawn

Tor, Argentina, 1939

Avon, 1950: big, big hair

Avon, 1956 (with bonus Lawrence): smaller hair makes for a useful hand-rest

Berkley, 1958: lipstick

Colombian edition, 1981: remember the era when every photo had this sort of soft-focus effect? Wasn't it awful?

Gallimard edition, French, 1963

French edition, 1985

Gallimard edition, French, 1960s: more scary hair

French edition, 1969

French edition, 1972: The Joy of Sex and Strategically Placed Vegetation

German edition, 1973

US edition, Grove, 1982

Civilização Brasileira edition, Brazil, designed by the amazing Eugênio Hirsch

Signet, 1950

Signet, 1957

Signet, 1959

Signet 1962: now it's a classic, we can show breasts

Signet, 2000s

Travellers Pocket Edition, Canada, 1949: the subtle version

Travellers Pocket Edition, Canada, 1949: the saucy version

Polish edition, 1991: hair big enough to contain a house

Spanish edition, 1978

And finally, a little further afield, the Hunt Emerson comic adaption...

..with the 'not for sale to wives and servants' line being a reference to one of the sillier utterances of Mervyn Griffith-Jones, prosecutor in the 1960 obscenity trial against Penguin Books for publishing the full version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, a trial summarised in this book with a cunning cover by David Pearson.

Five Wounds

2011-05-09T16:45:00.000-07:00

One of the strangest books I've come across recently is the peculiar and wonderful Five Wounds, by the writer Jonathan Walker and the artist Dan Hallett (and designed by Zoe Sadokierski). Any attempt to categorise it is doomed to failure, but as a starting point it can best be described as a an illustrated novel informed by the typographic structures of the King James Bible and inflected with various postmodern antics touches. And it has a talking dog. I've never read anything else quite like it.

Here's the cover, both a clean scan and lit up so that you can see the golden ink treatment. Click on all images for bigger versions.

It was published in Australia by Allen & Unwin last year, but has now just been released in the UK and the US. You need to see this book. Here are some images of the interior, both photos of the physical book and scans of the artwork taken from Jonathan Walker's flickr account.

A note: each of the book's five main characters has their own heraldic shield, and each page of the book has its own unique shield, which shows the characters on that page and their interactions. There are also visual annotations to the text in the margins of the pages, as well as handwritten notes and corrections to the text. And there is an insert of plates in the centre of the book as well. The text and the artwork are symbiotically related.

l
It's a book well worth getting, and once you have it, return to its website, which includes intriguing bonus material, including another text, referred to and quoted from in Five Wounds, but not included (and not needed for its comprehension).

Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy

2011-05-04T19:16:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the pun--I couldn't resist after I saw these gorgeous new covers for John Le Carre's books coming in June from Penguin US. They're by the artist Matt Taylor.

A Perfect Spy is especially good, but they're all excellent.

The only other cover design by Taylor that I know of is this beautiful cover for a ho-hum and deeply unconvincing book.

The Car's Beating Heart

2011-05-02T22:22:00.000-07:00

Having interviewed Melville House's ace art director, Christopher King, not long ago, I thought I'd have a look at what other books Melville had scheduled for the rest of the year. Among those I already knew about (and want!) was something new, a novel by Christopher Boucher about a man doing his best to raise his hyperactive son--a son who happens to be a 1960s Volkswagen Beetle. And what a cover it has! Click for a much bigger version.

Even though I can barely move these days for books I've bought and have yet to read, not to mention those I have read, it's the promise offered by covers like this that keep the torrent of new books coming through the front door.