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.

Infernal

Penguin seems to be going Dante crazy at the moment. Above is a new cover design for a new Penguin Classics UK edition of Inferno. They don't seem to have matching versions for Purgatorio and Paradiso, but then, as with Proust, most people don't make it past volume one, so perhaps they know their market. To be fair, Inferno is the most entertaining of the three: Dante is at his best consigning everyone who ever pissed him off to the flames, and less fun when he's just going on about Beatrice.

The above edition joins the recent hardback version, with a Coralie Bickford-Smith jacket:

Penguin Classics US, meanwhile, have just released a Graphic Classics edition of the full Divine Comedy, with cover artwork by Eric Drooker. I only know Drooker's work from his excellent wordless graphic novel, Flood. His other work includes a visual adaption of Ginsberg's Howl!, but as I pretty much loathe Ginsberg and his poetry, I haven't investigated that one.

Click to see it in all its glory

To see some of Flood, visit Drooker's site here.

Of course, none of these have quite the same effect as this edition of Inferno from Del Rey. I can't think of anyone who will buy this book because of its cover or videogame association who won't be bitterly disappointed, and anyone who wants the book for its literary value is not going to go with this edition. It's a perfect example of a misconceived book.

I don't remember scenes like this from the book:

(Typed laboriously while trying to wrangle an 11-day-old baby, so please excuse any typos...)

Last week I was interviewed on the IEEE Techwise Conversations podcast, talking about Whiskey Priest Books and the practicalities how to be a not-very-rich publisher of lost classics. Another chap on the program has published nearly 1,000,000 books, and makes rather more money--but at what cost?!!

Whisky Priest Books discussed:

So if you'd like to enjoy my honeyed tones, listen here or there.

A Possible Disruption in Services

A quick note and apology for what I suspect will be a disruption to blogging over the next few months, as I will soon bugger off on 3 months of paternity leave. Knee-deep in infant's poo and vomit as I suspect I may be, blogging will probably become less frequent.

This, despite my intention to be an example of:

who aims to be able to say:

and definitely hopes NOT to be thinking:

Every Christian Needs a Chainsaw

Thanks to the Guardian, who covered Caustic Cover Critic not too long ago, I now know of Lousy Book Covers, which everyone enjoys the awful category here should visit. Warning: if you use the Archive link, your eyes may bleed. Some of LBC's recent highlights include:

And then there's Najgorsze okładki, a site doing which has just sterling work in the same area, shaming the (self-)publishers of Poland:

Demented Genitals

I'll say this for self-published books: sometimes you can tell they're awful without even opening them. How's this for a blurb?


The domino effect was dominating my novice mind in such a way that I was feeling un-alcoholic delirium tremens while looking at her bosom bumping out of her cleavage. I put my mouth there and started licking. I supported her with my hand to lay down there. Her figure was so appealing to me that I was slipping down to the bottom. My mirage-burnt heart desired more and more to kiss her entire body. And that made me slip down to her G spot. 

My hand reached down her floss and then felt a soft touch of her labia majora while creeping through her pubic symphysis. From the back, I was still able to see her butt crack intoxicating me to have action gagnée. Her entire physic getting crammed up, was enticing me to give her Aussie kiss. She had a rampant drive of sex and her dazzling beauty was giving me the pre-penetrating feel of ecstasy and orgasm.

This is what happens when robots write porn equipped only with anatomy textbooks and intermittent access to the Indian equivalent of the Urban Dictionary. I'm an Australian, and I have no idea what "Aussie kiss" might mean in this context--normally I'd assume it meant something like a kiss flavoured with beer and charred barbecue meat, delivered during the ad break while watching a football match.

And this is the cover, with its pretty-much unbeatable title.

Vagina insanity. Yes, it certainly is.

(What's even more amazing is that the chap who wrote the book--and blurb--above has also self-published books entitled English Speaking and Grammar and English Word Power. Fortunately, to quote his biography, "[h]e is an international level English, French and Spanish language trainer for thirteen years. Not only down-to-earth but down-to-grave, observed lives from the Pandora of monkeys to the sanctuary of monks, have studied the Geeta, Bible and Qur'an all the three holy scriptures and the entire Oxford Dictionary.")

A for Anansi

There are quite a few Canadian books I'd like to get my hands on. unfortunately, unlike with books from the UK or the US, there are no online shops selling Canadian-published literature that don't charge embolism-inducing postage fees to post to Australia.

And now here are some more to tempt me from afar: they're the pleasingly retro-inflected A-List series from House of Anansi. Obviously inspired by old Penguins, each title has a new piece of hand-drawn illustration for its cover. Click for bigger versions.

That last title, by Lisa Moore, includes her story collection Open, which featured in this blog's second-ever post (on duplicate cover imagery).

Whisky Priest in the New York Times

More new cover criticism later this week, I promise, but in the mean time, I'm interviewed at the New York Times's technology site, talking about Whisky Priest Books and being your own niche classics publisher. (Said books are available here (worldwide), here (Amazon US) and here (Amazon UK).