Modiano in Monochrome

Now that a year has passed since Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for Literature, there has been time enough for a number of his books to be resurrected in, or newly translated to, English. Given his previous neglect in this language, it's no surprise that the rights to his back catalogue were scattered across a number of different publishers.

What's interesting is the uniformity of cover design, despite these books being put out by very different firms. Basically, everyone seems to have decided that for Modiano, moody monochrome photos are the way to go.

From Bloomsbury UK:

From the Margellos World Republic of Letters series, and from Verba Mundi (both of whom were commendably publishing Modiano before the Nobel win):

From New York Review Books (forthcoming next year):

From Bloomsbury US:

Even the publishers who did things a little differently still made use of monochrome illustrations (plus spots of reds, blues and purples) in a way that maintains the same atmosphere as the other covers above.

Text Publishing:

MacLehose Press:

And, perhaps the most distinct, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt:

Radicals

The first of Verso's Radical Thinkers series of philosophy paperbacks have been out for a while, but I didn't see them until the most recent releases in the series came out in January. They've taken the potentially difficult task of illustrating complex ideas and tackled it using elegant, sometimes abstract and sometimes punning, line illustrations and patterns on a clean white background. I would once have suspected it would take a gun to the head to make me read more Baudrillard, but now I realise it might just take a pretty face!

Here are some of my favourites from the series so far. Click for bigger versions.

For more Wilhelm Reich sex madness, see this post

Misterioso y evocador

I really like these new redesigns of the Javier Marías backlist for the Spanish-speakers of the Americas. The images used are appropriately mysterious and evocative of the odd worlds Marías conjured up (which is not to neglect his sense of humour). They're from Vintage Espanol. I especially like this first, cleverly oblique, design, for the book known in English as Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me. All covers are by Katya Mezhibovskaya.

Lew Archer: New, Newish and Old

The Lew Archer novels of Ross Macdonald are some of the best private-eye novels written, forming a sort of gumshoe Holy Trinity with Hammett and Chandler. Penguin UK have snaffled some of them for their Modern Classics range (to go with some other surprising but welcome crime-writing additions to that series), and have employed Edward Bettison to do the cover designs, with more than a hint of a stylish late-'50s, early-'60s vibe.

It's a pity the excellent Black Money isn't part of the set.

I'm also rather partial to the current US covers for the Archer books, put out by Vintage US/Black Lizard, which do a great job of playing up the noir aspects of their atmosphere.

All of these are quite a step away from the skin/boob-tastic covers inflicted on the books by Fontana at the tail end of the 1970s.

That last cover troubles me: is the target trapped under a breast? Between the cheeks of an incredibly lopsided arse? Clutched under a bingo wing?