Sunday, 25 October 2009

Book about Book-Burning Burnished with 36 Books, and an Oft-Banned Book

A novel due out in February, set in Franco's Spain, about book-burning, boxing and friendship, with a cover made up of 36 books:




And from the same publisher, Harvill Secker, and due out two months later, yet another Orwell face-lift, this time for a hardcover edition of Animal Farm.



Designers both unknown. The designer of the Rivas book is Michael Salu.

* * *

UPDATE: Regarding Pohl's The Age of the Pussyfoot, featured in this post, I find I have this scan of the main illustration from its first magazine appearance. The art is by comics legend Wally Wood. Click for a bigger version.


at

9 comments:

  1. Derek25 October 2009 at 18:37

    The Orwell one is neat, not just for the pig on two legs, but for the old-fashioned newspaper low-res screen.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bob Fingerman25 October 2009 at 22:00

    Wood did so many great illustrations for sci-fi digests, like Galaxy. Unfortunately, I'm guessing most of the original art is long gone. A really crappy book came out reprinting some of that stuff, but it was like bad photocopies. Moire patterns; looked like mud. Really awful. I have some original copies of Galaxy, but to do nice scans I'd have to destroy the bindings to get them to lay flat.

    ReplyDelete
  3. JRSM25 October 2009 at 23:17

    One place I've come across lots of great Wood (and other) pulp art is the amazing blog Golden Age Comic Book Stories: http://goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com/search/label/Wally%20Wood gets you to the Wood stuff, but it's amazing the other stuff he scans and puts up as well.

    I subscribe to a Yahoo group full of people scanning old pulps--how they do it without wrecking the originals is beyond me, but there have been some beautiful things on there. It's at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pulpscans/

    ReplyDelete
  4. Matthew Adams26 October 2009 at 06:47

    I love the orwell one as well, the red stamped Orwell and cheap looking newsprint on what looks like pig skin, like the red stamps you see on the pigs hanging in butchershop windows.

    The Books Burn Badly cover is so good i would probably buy the book just for the cover.

    ReplyDelete
  5. JRSM26 October 2009 at 15:03

    I'm feeling imilarly--I've never read anything by Rivas, but that cover's a good enough excuse to start.

    ReplyDelete
  6. John Self27 October 2009 at 03:35

    I don't like the Orwell, though clearly it matches the equivalent Nineteen Eighty-Four (and I also don't like that one as it presents the title, incorrectly, as 1984).

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous13 January 2010 at 11:55

    Hi,

    The Books Burn Badly cover is by Michael Salu.

    ReplyDelete
  8. JRSM13 January 2010 at 13:40

    Ah, thank you--I'll amend the post now.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous22 February 2010 at 04:49

    It iis not only a good cover... Books burn badly is an excellent piece of literature.

    ReplyDelete