Wednesday, 20 June 2012

Sex in the Middle East

Sex and the Citadel is an upcoming (January 2013) non-fiction account of the changing sexual lives of men and women in the Arab countries. Given the usual Middle Eastern book cover cliches, you might expect some variation on pictures of headscarves and perhaps a phallic rifle or two. Fortunately, publisher Chatto & Windus have gone in a very different direction, taking a traditional Arabic design and slightly tweaking it to give it a more labial feel...

The original design that I believe inspired the cover



The US edition (Pantheon) has a proposed cover that's slightly less daring, though it's not finalised, by Peter Mendelsund...



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5 comments:

  1. Ian Koviak20 June 2012 at 21:54

    bottom one is mendelsund.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JRSM20 June 2012 at 22:23

    Thanks--I'll add that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous22 June 2012 at 04:01

    I can't help it, but the second one has to be a bad joke - I mean a phallic tower construct as cover picture for a book on sex, seriously?

    That's so 70's.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Rex Parker22 June 2012 at 08:05

    I used to play bass for Labial Feel.

    ReplyDelete
  5. JRSM22 June 2012 at 18:11

    Ha ha ha! Ladies and gentlemen, Rex will be here (http://salmongutter.blogspot.com/) all week.

    ReplyDelete