Tampering

Continuing the theme from the interview last week, here's the clever and similarly themed cover for Alissa Nutting's Tampa, about a female teacher with a ravenous sexual appetitie for under-aged boys. The design is by Gray318 (more of his work in these posts).

The book itself is not a total success. The publishers on both sides of the Atlantic (Faber for the cover above) make the inevitable comparisons to Lolita. But we don't read Lolita because it's about a paedophile (or at least I hope we don't), we read it because it's a masterpiece of literary style and wit. Tampa, which I would be amazed to learn wasn't based on the case of the female paedophile teacher who was ludicrously deemed "too pretty to go to prison", doesn't have the same brilliance (though to be fair, what does?)--instead it's a claustrophic, monomaniacal book, entirely focused on the narrator's exploitation and plans for the exploitation of young male flesh. In the end, what's the point of it? To teach us that sexual predators are vile people? I already knew that.

On Your Bike

A play I just read, Penelope Skinner's The Village Bike, is about a sexually frustrated pregnant woman who buys a bicycle and then gets involved in an affair with the bike's previous owner. It has a really clever, witty and rude cover by artist Jurgen Ziewe.

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.

The Buzzing

Faber & Faber have just announced the winner of a competition for artists aged 13-16 to design a cover for a new edition of William Golding's The Lord of the Flies to come out later this year. The winning design is quite astonishing, I think: 'Into the Mouth of the Beast' by an unnamed 15-year-old artist. (Click for bigger versions)

Here are a few of the other entries I particularly like.

That last design is a clever real-world reconstruction of one of the book's longest-lived, well-known covers:

For more Flies interpretations, see the middle of this post and the end of this one.

Matt Taylor's Le Carre's Update (plus Pelham and Wolpe for walls)

In May I raved about Matt Taylor's wonderful John Le Carre covers for Penguin US. He's produced one more, for January's republication of the classic The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

And here's the un-texted illustration.

Also! Heroes of this blog David Pelham and Berthold Wolpe have some of their celebrated cover designs for Penguin and Faber respectively available as fancy art prints here. If you have any wall space not obscured by jammed bookshelves, how about filling it with some book covers?

Here are the designs: Wolpe's famous text-based covers for Faber, and Pelham's famous A Clockwork Orange and J. G. Ballard covers.

Habibi

Yesterday, I finally got around the reading the latest comics world sensation, the near-700-page Habibi, by Craig Thompson. I enjoyed it, though I had some strong reservations about a number of its elements. For a much more thorough discussion of its successes and failings, see this extensive and discursive discussion at The Comics Journal. One area in which the book undoubtedly does succeed is in its design, all Thompson's work, and which I want to show off here (mine is the UK Faber edition, though I believe it's pretty much identical to the US Pantheon edition). Click on any image for a much larger version.

Front endpapers

Chapter title page

 

A whole mess of internal page spreads

Back endpapers

 I also appreciate the fact that the ISBN, barcode and blurb is on a removable slip of paper, and so don't disfigure the back cover.