Minter

When Penguin Classics US published Angela Carter's edition of Charles Perrault's fairy tales (he is responsible for the classic versions of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots, among others), they used an attractive but pretty conventional image for the cover (by John Hassall).

But when Penguin Classics UK published the book, they used something different: a striking photo by New York artist Marilyn Minter.

It's an image ('Stepping Up', 2005) that reveals more over time: at first it just seems to be Cinderella in her glass slippers. But then you see that the feet are spattered with water and mud or shit; like all really good fairy stories, there's both sexiness and murkiness here.

In January, Penguin UK are republishing two more Carter titles: her lush, sexy and strange science-fiction novels Heroes and Villains (an end-of-the-world story) and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.

Again, these are great: erotic and creepy in equal measure, like fashion photos from an orgy at the decadent collapse of some technicolour civilisation, where faces turn into molluscs on glass.

For more of Minter's work, see her gallery, Salon 94, here and more here. Or read these Minter monographs:

(The Infernal Desire Machines was also one of the Penguin Decades (see here). For a different style of Angela Carter covers, see Roxanna Bikadoroff's work here.)

With thanks to Alan Trotter for the two newest Angela Carter cover images.

Zandra Rhodes's 1970s Penguins

A couple of weeks ago I posted the covers by Sir Peter Blake for the 1950s entries in the upcoming Penguin Decades series. Now its time to jump two decades on, to the covers that punk-influenced (and influencing) textile designer Zandra Rhodes has created for the 1970s books.

 

 

 

I particularly like the Susan Hill cover, while the Daphne du Maurier doesn't seem unsettling enough. I'm not sure what embossing/debossing/varnishing treatments will be used on these (if any), as that could add greatly to the tactile, textile-aping effect. We'll see closer to the time. And again, there's one cover missing--William Trevor's young-psycho-on-the-prowl novel The Children of Dynmouth.

UPDATE: Here's the previously missing Trevor cover:

Two decades are still to come: the 1960s, with covers designed by the great Alan Aldridge, and the 1980s, with covers designed by John Squire (once of potential-squandering band The Stone Roses). I'm excited by the prospect of the former, and worried by the prospect of the latter (unless Squire has moved on from his Jackson-Pollock-aping-but-with-fruit-nailed-on paintings).

Roxanna Bikadoroff & Angela Carter

Roxanna Bikadoroff is a Canadian illustrator who has done a lot of work on book covers over the years: some of these are shown at her website. Among the highlights of her work are she did the covers for Penguin US's reissues of Angela Carter's work a few years ago (and then for Virago's reissues more recently). They have a wonderfully sinister, gruesomely sexy cartoonish quality, exactly right for Carter's sensuous, rich and fantastic prose--especially her various takes on old fairy stories, in all their bloody glory. Click for bigger versions, as always.




There's something reminiscent of Ronald Searle about her work. I also like that the typography is all done by her, by hand, rather than using some 'irregular' digital typeface.

Another nice touch are the little Penguin logos on the covers. Most corporations are tediously insistent on 'brand identity' and the like, never letting any little changes be made to their dull, set-in-concrete corporate look. On the Penguin Carters here, though, each has been rendered in a form appropriate to the book--a clown, a heart, an executioner, a mouse(?), a torn image and a marionette are shown here.