Anna May Wong

Following on from Louise Brooks and Josephine Baker, we have another beautiful actress of erratic career who features on a number of book covers. Today's subject is Anna May Wong (Wong Liu Tsong). She was no victim of the ugly stick, I think you'll agree.




Wong had a troubled life before the heart attack which killed her at the age of 56. A Publishers Weekly review of the biography by Graham Russell Gao Hodges sums it up succinctly: "While Wong (1905-1961) has been called "the premier Asian-American actress," controversies surrounding her career have left her life and work largely unexamined ... Although Wong was a third-generation Californian, she needed permits to re-enter the U.S. after her foreign tours. She could work in the movies, but only in Asian roles, replete with negative stereotypes. Even then, she was barred from roles involving marriage with non-Asians-even with white actors playing Asians. Off-screen romance wasn't much easier; a Chinese husband wouldn't accept her career, but marriage to a non-Asian violated anti-miscegenation laws. Still, Wong persevered, improving what roles she could get by supplying authentic costumes, hairstyles and gestures. When even bad roles disappeared, she turned to the stage or took work in European film productions. Wong's Chinese war relief work and post-WWII TV appearances provided some satisfaction in her last years."



Another biography uses a different image...



..while a guide to her films makes unwise use of the eye-warping colour palette from the old Apple II computers.



This general film reader uses a sinister promotional image that plays on her stereotyped 'dragon lady' image...



..while this great photo fronts a collection of fiction from Asian-American writers.



Then there's this look at American Orientalism, with Wong in the middle...



..and finally, a demonstration of Wong's new fate: no longer a typecast actress stuck in racist caricatures, but a poster-woman for postmodern reconsiderations of cultural identity.



UPDATE: I just realised another Wong cover has already featured on this blog. It's the unused original cover for Eileen Chang's Lust, Caution, as discussed here.

Cover Changes

When you're the sort of sad person who pores over publisher catalogues you sometimes spot interesting changes in cover design between the original announcement and the final book. Sometimes they're improvements; sometimes not. Either way, the original designs disappear from the web and are never seen again. This is a shame when they were good.

Two examples from Penguin are shown here. The first is the rejigging of the cover to Eileen Chang's Lust, Caution (Chang's work having been discussed earlier here and here).



Presumably the idea was to capitalise on Ang Lee's movie with a still from the film on the cover. Though the image itself is fine, and avoids the usual movie tie-in cover pitfalls (ie hideous ugliness and instant datedness), I can't help feeling that the original was more beautiful and eye-catching.

The second example is Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.



Part of the reason for this must have been to update the book to fit the new Modern Classics look. The first image was from the classic 1949 movie. The second, very wisely, is not from the widely panned 2006 remake. The new cover is more dynamic, and probably better, though the simplicity of the original image of John Ireland has a certain appeal.

Which versions of these books would you be more likely to pick up?

UPDATE: The original Lust, Caution cover features Anna May Wong--see this post for more.

Speaking of Eileen Chang

While we're on the topic of Eileen Chang, the New York Review Books (NYRB from now on) edition of Love in a Fallen City has a very different but also very striking cover.



NYRB books in general are lovely to look at, and I'll be doing a post on them later. Interestingly, the design of the line has a lot in common with the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics discussed in my last post. Compare the contained text boxes which allow the well-chosen cover images plenty of room to breathe.



It's also worth noting that the invariably excellent Ang Lee's next movie (Lust, Caution) is based on a story by Eileen Chang.

Penguin Modern Classics

One of my favourite series of books, in both content and design, are the Penguin Modern Classics. They've been around in one form or another since the middle of last century, and I'll be looking at the earlier versions in a later post.

Since the 1990s, however, they have had several redesigns, illustrated in this photo (click for a larger view).



1.) This is a Penguin Twentieth-Century Classic (as they were known for a while), with the characteristic blue-green spine, non-orange Penguin Logo, and white cover/title text box. This was the look from the 1990s, although some books are still in print in this format today, not having yet been updated.

2.) In 2000, Penguin hired designer Jamie Keenan to redesign the Twentieth-Century Classics, and restored the original Penguin Modern Classics name. The spines became silver, with the author/title text limited to a narrow silver band on the cover. This meant that the unobstructed cover image took up the majority of the cover--usually rather effectively.

3.) In 2004, this design was slightly altered by the addition of a white band containing the Penguin logo and the words 'MODERN CLASSICS', bringing the Modern Classics into line with the 2001 redesign of the "black" classics (see the Phil Hale covers for the Joseph Conrad books for an example of these).

4.) Starting in September 2007, the Modern Classics have undergone probably their most substantial redesign ever. The spines are now white (matched by narrow white bands at the top and bottom of the front cover), and the restrained text has turned into huge silver and white lettering which obscures a large chunk of the image. I was not at all sure about this to start with, but it can be very effective: look at these lovely covers for two collections of the great Eileen Chang's stories and novellas, to be released in December this year.