Resurrections

A number of publishing houses are now running print-on-demand wings, usually offering both ebook and POD print editions of various back-catalog books that are not big money-spinners in any one year, but which provide a small, steady income.

As the margins shrink on printed books and the ebook market grows, more and more backlist titles will end up in these printed-as-POD-only ghettos, with little in the way of title-specific design. Instead, almost all of these imprints have a series 'look', with minimal differences between the covers other than author and title details. Because of this, I think it's worth having a look at what the future holds.

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First up is Faber Finds, previously discussed here. Initially each book had its own randomly generated pattern on the front, the colour of the pattern indicating the genre (red=fiction, blue=general non-fiction, green=children, etc).

[As an aside, that John Bowen book, The Centre of the Green, a 1950s domestic/social comedy, has a great exchange when a retired military man decides to take up reading fiction:

The Colonel did not intend to be defeated by a work of fiction, and having begun, persevered with it. "Going to take me a long time to get through, though," he said. "All this detail! What imaginations these chaps have, eh?"
"How far have you got?"
"Nineteen hundred and ten."
"Cheer up. You're bound to lose a lot of characters in the war."
"More chaps'll get born though," the Colonel said. "You see if they don't."]

More recently the series has had an overhaul, with a sleeker, quieter look; the stripe under the author name fulfills the same colour-for-genre function. (And the books no longer seem to have the OCR-induced typos that plagues some of the earlier titles.)

Next we have the Gollancz SF Gateway, an ebook-only imprint of hundreds and hundreds of old SF and fantasy works, some wonderful and some justly neglected, which make use of the traditional glaring yellow covers Victor Gollancz books were known for in the past. The SF books get chunky capitals, while the fantasy novels get a community-newsletter fancypants script.

Next is the Bloomsbury Reader collection, which started as Bloomsbury's old ebook range and is now expanding into startlingly expensive POD editions. Each cover gets a standard patttern of repeating logos, with different writers getting different colours.

Penguin Classics UK has a few of their books as PODs only. The Penguin Modern Classics have the startlingly minimalist look I complained about here...

..while the non-modern Classics get various abstract patterns.

The most recent series of these resurrected books I have encountered is The House of Books, from Australian publisher Allen & Unwin. They also use various abstract patterns, but the visual effect is quite pleasing. My only complaint about these is that they've got the text as a digital file for the ebook versions, so I assume it's only money-saving that has led to some of the printed books using horribly tiny type photostatted from old paperbacks, instead of nicely set new layouts.

Five Wounds

One of the strangest books I've come across recently is the peculiar and wonderful Five Wounds, by the writer Jonathan Walker and the artist Dan Hallett (and designed by Zoe Sadokierski). Any attempt to categorise it is doomed to failure, but as a starting point it can best be described as a an illustrated novel informed by the typographic structures of the King James Bible and inflected with various postmodern antics touches. And it has a talking dog. I've never read anything else quite like it.

Here's the cover, both a clean scan and lit up so that you can see the golden ink treatment. Click on all images for bigger versions.



It was published in Australia by Allen & Unwin last year, but has now just been released in the UK and the US. You need to see this book. Here are some images of the interior, both photos of the physical book and scans of the artwork taken from Jonathan Walker's flickr account.


A note: each of the book's five main characters has their own heraldic shield, and each page of the book has its own unique shield, which shows the characters on that page and their interactions. There are also visual annotations to the text in the margins of the pages, as well as handwritten notes and corrections to the text. And there is an insert of plates in the centre of the book as well. The text and the artwork are symbiotically related.





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It's a book well worth getting, and once you have it, return to its website, which includes intriguing bonus material, including another text, referred to and quoted from in Five Wounds, but not included (and not needed for its comprehension).

Black Cockatoos and Crying Children

Australian publisher Allen & Unwin is celebrating its 20th birthday with four "classics" from its backlist (I use inverted commas as The Slap is too new and anything by Andrew McGahan is not good enough to qualify), done up in fancy screenprinted fabric boards, without any text on the covers. The four books in question are (click for much bigger versions):

Journey to the Stone Country by Alex Miller

White Earth by Andrew McGahan

Lilian's Story by Kate Grenville

The Slap by Christon Tsiolkas

 I really dig these--the textlessness, the limited colours and the bold graphics really work. I don't know who any of the artists are as yet, but am endeavouring to find out.



UPDATE: Annette of Allen & Unwin gave me the designer details--"It was our two very talented inhouse designers, Lisa White for 'Lilian's Story' and 'The Slap' and Emily O'Neill for 'Journey to the Stone Country' and 'The White Earth'. Lisa reworked the artwork on 'Lilian's Story' from the original cover art by Hans Selhofer. We're very proud of these 20th anniversary editions and very proud of our excellent designers."