Purple Yellow Blue

No credits for these as yet, but they're the eye-grabbing new covers for Picador UK's re-releases of some of the B. S. Johnson backlist. See here for their full-on edition of The Unfortunates, the famous unbound book in a box. UPDATE: They're designed by La Boca.

That Trawl cover is so much more appealing than my tacky old Panther edition, which is typically boob-tastic for that publisher and era.

Biographies, Autobiographies and Memoirs

For the most part, the covers of autobiographies and biographies are a wasteland of uninspired duds. By far the majority feature primped-up studio portraits, where the author (or "author" in many cases) of the book obviously either (mistakenly) regards themselves as gorgeous, or funny. In both case, the word that springs to mind when I see these faces on bookshop shelves is "punchable".



Also pretty bad are those biographies which have people pretending to be the subjects on the covers, rather than the real people, thanks to the wonders of movie tie-in deals.



Much better are those books where, due to either the author/subject's lack of overwhelming ego or else a combination of their being dead and a publisher being willing to overlook the obvious, the portrait used is either cunningly oblique...



..not recognisable as the author without the prompting of the name on the cover (and yet communicating some essential part of their character)...



..or else frankly odd.



Finally, you have those autobiographies which can get entirely away from the need to picture their author on the cover. This may be due to the fact that nobody would have a clue who they were anyway, or else the book is a long-established classic which allows someone with a bit of flair to have a go at the cover. The best of these often feature no recognisable human beings at all.

Spineless

Last night I read a book I've been wanting to get my hands on for a number of years. It's B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, the famous "book in a box". First published in 1969, it went out of print (like most of Johnson's other works), was then resurrected briefly by Picador in 1999 (to go OP again), and has now got a third lease of life thanks to New Directions in America.

The Unfortunates is a simple story told beautifully. A man (Johnson himself) goes to Nottingham in his role as a sports journalist to cover a soccer match. With time to kill before the match, he roams the city, remembering a friend who died from cancer, and the women with whom he was involved during the time he knew that friend.

To capture the non-linear nature of the narrator's thought processes, Johnson wrote the book as 27 chapters, with only the first and last to be read as normal. The other 25 chapters should be shuffled and read in random order. To assist this, each of the chapters is seperate, and contained in a box, rather than the whole book being bound normally.

New Directions, following the Picador printing, have done a beautiful job. The minimalist, illustration-free cover doesn't distract you from the joys within the book-shaped box. The interior of the box itself contains details of the book's history, the match report from the novel, and several quotes from Johnson's heroes Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne.

Here's the "book" as it first appears (click for much bigger versions of all of these images):



What you see when you open it:



The unbound pages and the box interior:



A close-up of the box interior:



The various unbound chapters on the loose:




A page with some small images from the original Secker & Warburg edition of 1969 is here.