Vaulting

Current reading is David Rose's The Vault: An Anti-Novel (the subtitle coming from the fact that part of the book is a novel, and part is the annoyed commentary from the man whose life story inspired the novel). It's really good!

I bought it on the strength of a very positive review that I now can't find, and am very glad I did. This is true even though a lot of it concerns sports (competitive cycling, in this case), and the world of sports is not just a closed book to me, but a closed book locked in a safe, sealed in concrete and sunk in a pit of toxic waste. Fortunately, it also concerns sniping and nuclear espionage, among other things.

The cover is a lovely bit of work by the great David Pearson: it doesn't attempt to graphically represent anything from the story: it just uses text and simple shapes to seize the eyeballs.

Chatterley Bonanza

D. H. Lawrence and his Lady Chatterley's Lover has cropped up quite a bit round here recently. I thought it might be entertaining to look at some of the current and past covers for this famous book (often famous for the wrong reasons). The two opening images here are lithograhs (by a Peter Schem?) from a 1956 French edition.

Let's start with the mind-addling variety of editions currently in print from Penguin...

The 50th anniversary edition from last year

The standard Penguin Classics edition, with art by Aaron Robinson (see here)

The current Penguin Essentials edition with art by Lucy McLauchlan (see here)

The Penguin Graphic Classics edition, with art from Chester Brown (click for much bigger version)

The Penguin Hardback Classics edition, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith (interviewed here)

The Popular Penguins edition

Six different versions of one book in print from the one publisher? Not weird at all.

Then there are Penguin's various past editions, some of which are...

Popular Classics edition, 1990s

Various Penguin 20th Century Classics editions, late 1980s to mid-1990s

Penguin US, 1948

Film tie-in

Penguin, 1960

Penguin, 1978, photo by fashion/erotica photographer Harri Peccinotti (thanks, Gould!)

Penguin, 1980

Penguin Designer Classic by Paul Smith, 2006

Essential Penguin, 1990s

Penguin Modern Classic, early 2000s

Penguin US, 1946

Then there's the new edition from Vintage Classics, with a photo by Carla van de Puttelaar (see here for more)...

 

Some of you may remember a couple of awful ebook covers for other Lawrence novels. You'll be thrilled to know that the same company now has a Lady Chatterley edition to match, with Lady C and Mellors rather unexpectedly getting it on in an empty theatre.

This is not the only shitty ebook version out there. For example...

Mellors's smooth moods were her only distraction from the rising damp from Alpha Centauri

Wiped, but left toilet paper between buttocks

But let's get back to physical books from the past, both in English and not...

Ace, 1958: the erotic possibilities of a well-trimmed lawn

Tor, Argentina, 1939

Avon, 1950: big, big hair

Avon, 1956 (with bonus Lawrence): smaller hair makes for a useful hand-rest

Berkley, 1958: lipstick

Colombian edition, 1981: remember the era when every photo had this sort of soft-focus effect? Wasn't it awful?

Gallimard edition, French, 1963

French edition, 1985

Gallimard edition, French, 1960s: more scary hair

French edition, 1969

French edition, 1972: The Joy of Sex and Strategically Placed Vegetation

German edition, 1973

US edition, Grove, 1982

Civilização Brasileira edition, Brazil, designed by the amazing Eugênio Hirsch

Signet, 1950

Signet, 1957

Signet, 1959

Signet, 1959

Signet 1962: now it's a classic, we can show breasts

Signet, 2000s

Travellers Pocket Edition, Canada, 1949: the subtle version

Travellers Pocket Edition, Canada, 1949: the saucy version

Polish edition, 1991: hair big enough to contain a house

Spanish edition, 1978

And finally, a little further afield, the Hunt Emerson comic adaption...

..with the 'not for sale to wives and servants' line being a reference to one of the sillier utterances of Mervyn Griffith-Jones, prosecutor in the 1960 obscenity trial against Penguin Books for publishing the full version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, a trial summarised in this book with a cunning cover by David Pearson.