Showing posts with label Bill Brandt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Brandt. Show all posts

Monday, 30 July 2012

Templeton/Lawrence/Brandt/Langer/Sabato

A new edition of Edith Templeton's classic 1960s novel Gordon is imminent from Penguin, using a lovely Bill Brandt photo.



They're also rereleasing her story collection, The Darts of Cupid, an ebook, with a different Brandt cover:



Penguin have used that image before, for one of the variant editions of Lady Chatterley.



In the US, Gordon looks like this:



This photo, 'Elevator' by Jason Langer, is also used by Penguin UK:



Gordon in the UK used to look like this (this is the Viking hardcover I own):



Unusually, the image was used in the various foreign language editions:

German edition

Spanish edition
The sad thing is, I suspect that it's only get a new edition because of the new interest in bondage/dominance because of those bloody Fifty Shades books.

Speaking of Lawrence, here's a previously undiscovered addition to his back-catalogue:




Sunday, 20 December 2009

Twenty Thousand Streets, One Cover Image

One of my favourite books by one of my favourite writers, the Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky trilogy by the great Patrick Hamilton, has recently been rejigged in the cover department by Vintage UK. Unfortunately, it's been rejigged to look the same as a couple of other books that already exist.

 
 
 

Before the update, it featured possibly the least prepossessing barmaid in history...




This is from a Bill Brandt photo, 'Barmaid at the Crooked Billet, Tower Hill 1939'.



And before that, it looked like this...


And way back in the misty past, like this (an edition which now will set you back between $2000 and $5000, depending on condition).


This is as good a place as any to have a small whinge: Hamilton's much-praised first novel, Monday Morning, remains out of print and also completely unavailable, both second-hand and in libraries. Two different publishers have assured me over the last couple of years that they were going to reprint it in the very near future (at one point it was meant to be a Faber Find). No luck. Somebody needs to publish that book NOW, or my wrath will be terrible indeed.

UPDATE: John Self points out what I had forgotten--that NYRB also publishes Twenty Thousand Streets..., with a rather nice cover (designed by Katy Homans) using 'The Long House (red Bathroom/Blue Figure)' by Laurie Simmons.