Seeing Double on Absinthe

John Self of Asylum, probably the internet's best collection of book reviews, kindly pointed out to me another of these two-covers, one-image occasions.

The first is Leonid Tsypkin's novel about Dostoevsky on a gambling binge, Summer in Baden-Baden, a book I really, really wanted to like but had a great deal of trouble getting into.


The second is the new Vintage Classics editions of Somerset Maugham's thoroughly entertaining and faintly mad The Magician, a science-fantasy riff on the life of self-proclaimed "wickedest man alive" and proclaimed-by-me "tedious wanker" Aleister Crowley.



The original is a Pernot ad by Leonetto Cappiello.


Mysteriously, the Penguin Tsypkin cover has removed the label from the bottle.

There's more on Cappiello and absinthe in an earlier post, here.

UPDATE: Now we're seeing triple...

Absinthe!

There's an image I like a lot which I found in a Dover reprint collection of fin de siecle French advertising posters, Masters of the Poster.

The image is an 1896 advertisement for Absinthe Robette by Privat-Livemont. I love it so much I had it made into a (possibly copyright-defying) shirt.

I just wish I actually liked absinthe itself more--in fact, I can't stand the taste of it. It's one of those things where the idea of something is more appealing than the reality.

There's another famous Absinthe poster, this time from 1901, that was done by Leonetto Cappiello for Absinthe Ducros.

Here are the original posters: click for much bigger versions.




And here they are on the hardcover and paperback covers for Jad Adams' Hideous Absinthe:




And here they are again, on the covers to issues 1 and 8 of Absinthe: New European Writing magazine.



That's a lot of absinthe.

UPDATE: A cartoon from 1904...