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:

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.

* * *

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.

Highsmiths

In this post I complained about what happens when a publisher changes a series look, ruining the look of any complete set of books by an author you might have on your shelves (because this is all I have to moan about in life). A related problem is when a writers' works are split between multiple publishers. An interesting approach to this has been demonstrated by Vintage and Bloomsbury, in regard to the great Patricia Highsmith.

Highsmith's five Ripley novels* are, for the most part, brilliant exercises in black, claustrophobic drama that manage to have you barracking for a psychopathic aesthete as he murders his way to a better life, and murders his way out of trouble. In the UK and Commonwealth, the first four are published by Vintage, while the fifth and final book is from Bloomsbury. This means that a nicely matching set ought to be impossible.

However, when Bloomsbury rereleased their Highsmith books at the turn of the millennium, designer Nathan Burton seems to have gone out of his way to create a design that, though not infringing on the copyright of, or exactly mimicking, the Vintage designs (by Julian Humphries), matches them as well as you could hope.

 

And then the Bloomsbury Highsmiths got a redesign--again by Nathan Burton, using his appealing illustrations and a rough hand-drawn type for the author name.

 

 

 

This ought to throw things out with the Vintage covers--except that Vintage has reciprocated by redesigning their own Highsmiths along similar lines.

 

 

 

 

I'm not sure if there's been any deliberate communication between the two publishers on these designs, but it's a good thing.

Speaking of Ripley, Norton in the US has recently released this gorgeous boxed set of the books. The box and books are designed by Chin-Yee Li--the photos of the individual books are taken from the excellent Book Covers Anonymous blog.

 

 

 

 

 

And then there are the beautiful new Norton paperbacks of the Ripley books, designed by Rodrigo Corral, Christopher Brand and Jason Ramirez.

 

 

 

 

So it's a good time to be buying Ripley.

Highsmith, by the way, is the only serious writer I can think of who had the dubious honour of getting a nude photo of herself put on the cover of her biography (and not by her choice, given that she was dead several years before it was published): the spine of the UK edition of Andrew Wilson's Beautiful Shadow features this unexpected image.

 

* A question: does anyone have an explanation for this odd aspect of the Ripley books? Each book is set at about the time it was published, so the first book is very obviously taking place in the 1950s, while Space Invaders machines and other such aspects of more modern life appear in the last couple of books. And yet, by internal chronology, only a few years have passed. Highsmith is too smart and careful a writer to have not done this on purpose, and yet it's quite discombobulating.