Matt Taylor's Le Carre's Update (plus Pelham and Wolpe for walls)

In May I raved about Matt Taylor's wonderful John Le Carre covers for Penguin US. He's produced one more, for January's republication of the classic The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

And here's the un-texted illustration.

Also! Heroes of this blog David Pelham and Berthold Wolpe have some of their celebrated cover designs for Penguin and Faber respectively available as fancy art prints here. If you have any wall space not obscured by jammed bookshelves, how about filling it with some book covers?

Here are the designs: Wolpe's famous text-based covers for Faber, and Pelham's famous A Clockwork Orange and J. G. Ballard covers.

Fake Faber

A bit of an odd case this time round, with a cover noted by Welsh correspondent Miss Disco. A newish collection of Welsh poets from Parthian Press is deliberately aping the look of 1980s-era Faber & Faber poetry covers, even down to using Albertus (the font designed especially for Faber by Berthold Wolpe*), and mimicking the repeating publisher's logo in the background.

Cover design by Lucy Llewellyn

Compare this with the Fabers...

This is the first time I've seen this overt tribute/mimickry applied to a non-Penguin classic design.

* Although, as it turns out, Faber did not use Albertus for those covers...

Faber & Faber & Faber & Faber...

My most recent purchase of book porn is Faber and Faber: Eighty Years of Book Cover Design (which I first mentioned here).



This is a lovely, oversized (roughly A4) collection of images of Faber's covers from 1929 onwards. The text is minimal, but there are hundreds and hundreds of pretty pictures to look at. Excuse the photographs (which you can click for much bigger views), but there was no way I was killing this thing's spine with my scanner.





The book itself had its cover designed by Neil Gower, mimicking the classic work of Berthold Wolpe, who did pretty much all of Faber's covers for some 35 years (as well as designing Albertus, the font used on this and many other earlier Faber covers).







Faber, at least in its earlier decades, did not have the range of cover art of, say, Penguin, due in part to having one designer with a consistent vision, but there are plenty of gems here.

My only criticism is that Connolly seems to lose interest after about 1980, and there are hardly any covers from the last 30 years shown here. This means that there are few of Pentagram's covers, and, weirdly, absolutely none by Andrzej Klimowski. It was Klimowski's covers for the work of Milan Kundera that first caught my eye and drew my attention to Faber back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, when I was a young lad for whom the combination of literature and naked women was pretty much irresistable.



(For Klimowski doing Wodehouse, see here.)