For 'No Shame', see under 'HarperCollins' (plus Gleaming Buttocks)

If you've been in a bookshop in the last couple of years, you've seen what a raging success Stephanie Meyer's various Twilight books have become. The books are published by an imprint of Little, Brown.



Lo, HarperCollins did look upon these works, and want a piece of the financial action. So what have they done? Committed aesthetic violence upon a public-domain novel beloved by the characters in the Twilight books, giving it a cheap and nasty copycat cover, and sent it forth to rake in the cash.



UPDATE: How do our friends at Tutis choose to cover Wuthering Heights? Like this, of course.



Yours for around US$17. Or you could lash out on the US$20 BiblioBazaar edition, which features the bicycle Heathcliff used on his trips through the moors...

* * *

And here's something completely different: an amusingly daft cover for Goldfinger, as published by MJF Books in 1997.

Unexpected Trevor

I was pleased to find, in the catalogue of a library to which I have access, a copy of William Trevor's first novel, A Standard of Behaviour. I've never read this, and never seen it for sale, since it seems to have been suppressed by the author, and no longer appears on the list of his other works at the front of his books.

So then I found the book in the stacks, and was delighted to see the cover (you really need to click on it for the full effect)...



I have no idea who did the artwork, but this was the last edition of this novel to see print. It is literal interpretation of a scene in the book.

A Standard of Behaviour is by no means a great book, but it's very enjoyable in the way of lot of books from its time and place (1950s England) turn out to be: amusing, observant, with an atmosphere of post-War shabbiness and somewhat dated "daring" subject matter: a thoroughly pleasant way to pass the time, and ultimately a little forgettable. You would have been unlikely to guess, based on this first outing, that Trevor would go on to be a novelist and, most especially, short story writer of fearsome talent.

Deeply Odd POD

It does the soul good, every now and then, to point at book covers gone terribly wrong. Sometimes I'm not a fan of a cover, and I say so, but I feel a bit bad, as it's a matter of taste, and maybe I'm wrong.

Sometimes, though, there's no way I could be wrong. Remember the woefulness of these ebook covers? Well, I've recently found the output of a POD outfit called Tutis Digital Publishing. Like a thousand other operations, most of their catalogue seems to be books taken from Project Gutenberg and other online public-domain text depositories, dumped into a Microsoft Word template, and then slapped between covers featuring a bit of cheap or free stock art.

Sometimes this art is basically appropriate enough.



These are fine. Leadenly literal, but they make sense.

Then there are those where you can see the thought processes involved. The Cuckoo Clock? Put a cuckoo on the cover. Dawn of All? Put a dawn on the cover.



These are not really right, nor any actual good, but you can see why some harried, underpaid minion at a POD company might have chosen these images while in a rush.

Related to these are the covers where the image has a remotely tangential relationship with the contents of the book.

"Daughter of Eve? There must be a woman in it. This is a picture of a woman. Sure, she's a sort of New Age flea-market-art-stall-idea of a Native American, and she's clutching a gigantic scratched DVD, but she's a woman. It'll do."

"Ancient Egypt? They're famous for, like, big stone monuments, right? Sure, not castles with moats and everything, but it'll do."


"Hmm, a desperate character? He must be, like, a mugger or a bank robber or something. They all wear ski masks, right? What do you mean, Nineteenth-Century Russia? It'll do."

"A Little Tour in France? How do you reckon he got there in the first place, huh?"

"Well, they might mostly be about Irish independence, but see here, it says comedies? Well, see how the amputee octopus is laughing?"

"Hey, it's all 'the past', man!"


The final category is probably the biggest, representing at least half of Tutis's output. I like to call it 'What the flying fuck?'

Presenting Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford: not, as you might have thought, a novella about the relationships between women in a small Victorian-era English town, but the exciting tale of how a woman, having escaped Bond villain Goldfinger's clutches, goes on to become an inveterate fan of chill-out music.


Presenting Walter Scott's Chronicles of the Canongate: not a collection of Scottish short stories, but a science-fiction extravaganza set on an alien world with multiple moons.


Presenting Guy Boothby's A Bid for Fortune: not a fin de siècle tale of international master criminal Doctor Nikola, but a confectioner's guide to Christmas.


And presenting Izaak Walton's The Complete Angler: not a rambling guide to fishing, the countryside and rural lore, but the mind-boggling story of divine intervention putting a stop to aquatic thermonuclear war.


Two more, because I couldn't resist: Here's the fourth of Frank L. Baum's Wizard of Oz books, the one that features fighter jets and the planet Mars...


..and a book of short stories from the 1890s, the cover of which inexplicably features a painting of Sailor Mercury, a character from an awful 1990s Japanese cartoon.


Alas, this is not a joke. here's the original painting, and a more typical image of the character:


I literally cannot fathom the thought processes behind these covers. They're a perfect mix of ineptitude, inappropriateness, possible copyright violation, and sheer demented anti-genius.

UPDATE: A number of commenters have added to the madness. Nicole of Bibliographing points out that the last cover actually features Sailor Neptune, not Sailor Mercury. Harry of Heraclitean Fire adds that the bird on the front of The Cuckoo Clock isn't even a cuckoo. Anonymous led me to this even more blatant bit of copyright theft...


..which is not successfully disguised by making Mowgli a sickly hue of green. And finally, Brian of the Dusty Bookcase has gone above and beyond the call of duty by taking this investigation further, revealing the horrors wreaked on innocent Canada by Tutis. He also notes that a number of the books discussed here have suddenly vanished from Tutis's website.

See Elsewhere

(A quick post about groovy things elsewhere on the web)

SEE! Poets talking about their favourite poetry book covers, at the Best American Poetry blog.



SEE! The newly expanded and, frankly, wonderful The Art of Penguin Science Fiction, put together by James Pardey!



SEE! Its work-in-progress sister site, The Art of Fontana Modern Masters!



SEE! A movie being unusually up-front about its literary origins! (Taken from here.)



It's sad to SEE! that one of my favourite blogs, that belonging to the bookshop Crockatt and Powell, has ceased, due to the fact that the bookshop itself has had to close down because of the unfavourable current state of publishing/bookselling.

And finally, SEE! some upcoming covers for Penguin, designed by Richard Green, for some 2010 reprints of classic sensation novels. There are 10 in the series, though I could only find 8 of the covers. I learned of these via the Casual Optimist.









I really like these, though they're almost too tasteful.

PS: For readers in Australia, I've just found that Angus & Robertson has joined Borders in jacking up almost all of their book prices by at least 10% above the recommended retail price. Scumbags. Don't shop there.

Matsumoto

I recently talked about this book by Bohumil Hrabal as one which I ordered because I was charmed by the cover.



Now that I've got the book, I can tell you that the cover is by Mio Matsumoto, a Japanese-born and -based illustrator and designer who trained in London. Her work shows a definite influence from fashion illustration, and she has done several other book covers, so let's take a look.

First, another Hrabal cover, for I Served the King of England, a book which I wanted to like more than I did, having read it in the wake of loving Hrabal's wonderful Too Loud a Solitude.



(Sadly, I found Dancing Lessons... to be a bit more in the I Served... camp than the Too Loud... camp. It's a book written as a 100-page sentence, a rambling monologue by a cobbler ex-soldier to an audience of ladies, and while it has its charms, it's all a bit slight. Furthermore, there are a number of places where the 100-page sentence is actually broken, but sleight-of-punctuation tries to hide it. This may not matter, since the stream of words and commas gives the whole thing an unusual and effective momentum (with a suicide on every second page!), but it does seem a bit of a cheat.)

Matsumoto has also done a couple of other covers. The first is this agreeably scruffy and vivid illustration for Lucy Ellmann's Dot in the Universe.



It's a great cover--shame about the book. I read and thoroughly enjoyed Ellmann's first three books (the titles of which are plugged on the back of the dustjacket above), but Dot is an unmitigated disaster. I read to the end, expecting Ellmann to finish up with some cunning trick that turned all of the mess that had come before on its head, making something good out of the wreckage, but no: it was just misconceived and misbegotten from beginning to end. I'm all for authors experimenting and trying new things, but sometimes you have to know when not to publish the results.

To prove that I'm not a total whinger, though, here's Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's The Key, with a cover done by Matsumoto for the Vintage Blue series (a bunch of erotic, or at least very rude, classic novels repackaged by Vintage in 2004). Now this book--and author--is the good stuff.




Mio Matsumoto has also produced a book of her own. At the age of 25, she developed what she thought was a painful boil or ulcer on her tongue. After leaving it untreated for six months, she finally sought medical attention, and found that it was cancer. During the period of her treatment and recovery, she kept a diary in comic form, published last year by Jonathan Cape.



Rather than being translated from the Japanese, this is written in an English that is not so much broken as slightly skewed, which adds to its charm. The story behind this book is explored in greater depth in an interview with Mio here--the person who provided the title of this article would have done well to remember Clive James's advice that punning on Asian names is the lowest form of wit.



More of this style of writing, and of Matsumoto's work, is to be found at her blog.

Various Approaches to the Problem of Sherlock Holmes

Recent approaches to a much-covered subject...

Michael Kirkham for White's Books (see also here):


Coralie Bickford-Smith for Penguin (see also here):


Unknown for Vintage Classics UK:


Unknown for Atlantic Crime Classics (see also here):


And finally, Glen Orbik for Hard Case Crime (see also here):


UPDATE: Karen Horton, no mean designer herself, points me towards two more recent Holmesian covers.

The first is by Jen Wang, for Penguin US:


The second is by Rob Grom, for Thomas Dunne Books:


UPDATE 2: Regarding the Hard Case Crime cover, the ever-wise Tulkinghorn points out this extensive discussion of it with the publisher here, which also refers to this Orwell cover.