Somebody Use These NOW

I don't often post speculative covers here--as in non-published covers for books, covers created by designers for their own amusement--but the work of Belgian-based illustrator and designer Levente Szabó is too good not to be promoted. His Great Books Project involves creating dustjackets for a number of classic novels, and they're astonishingly beautiful and clever. Click any image below for bigger versions, and visit his portfolio for more, as well as a number of alternative sketches which most designers would kill to have come up with, let alone discard.

This cover, and that for Saramago's Blindness, below, are some of the cleverest applications of negative space I've ever seen.

  

Above is the proposed jacket, below is the design to be printed on the boards underneath

 

If the publishers with the rights to these books don't get in touch with Levente and snap up these designs straight away, then it's because they don't want to sell books.

Mendelsund Kafkas

I haven't much to say about these marvellous covers that hasn't already been said by either their designer, the great Peter Mendelsund (who I interviewed here), or in this very thoughtful post at the Casual Optimist. But I couldn't not show them, since they're so good. So, here are Mendelsund's upcoming covers for the works of Franz Kafka, forthcoming from Schocken Books in the US in mid-2011. Click for much bigger images.

Comic Classics

There has been a long tradition of comic versions of classic literature: the Classics Illustrated series began in 1941, and ran for 30 years, for example. I have read very few such adaptations, but have nothing against them in principle: a comic version is like a film version--almost certain to be inferior, but with the potential to do some things visually in a way that text on a page cannot. Because of this, I was interested to come across the publications of Selfmadehero, a company dedicated to comic adaptations of classic fiction, crime fiction, and Shakespeare (see below).

I'm posting the covers of their classic adaptations here because it's interesting to see these visual approaches to great works.

I have to say that I'm tempted to see what Andrzej Klimowski makes of Robert Louis Stevenson, and Martin Rowson seems a natural fit for Tristram Shandy. I do have an older graphic novel by Rowson, who is most famous as an incredibly savage political cartoonist: it's a weird book that recasts T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as a detective story.

Among other books, he's also done a cartoon history of the universe, entitled Fuck: The Human Odyssey.

Selfmadehero's Shakespeares, by the way, are all done in manga style:

The Ingenious Eugênio Hirsch

Sometimes you start out writing one post, and it turns into something else entirely. This was going to be a quick look at the various covers for Philip José Farmer's Flesh (and it sort of still is--see the end). However, in finding said covers, I came across the work of an Austrian-Brazilian book designer who I just had to write about.

Born in Vienna in 1921, Hirsch and his family wisely got the hell out of Europe in 1938, moving to Argentina. Hirsch himself moved to Brazil in 1957, and was soon hired by the Civilização Brasileira publishing house. It was for them that he produced his first cover, for the local edition of Nabokov's Lolita, which caused as much of a sensation in the design world as the book's contents did in the literary world.



Hirsch produced a number of great covers for Civilização Brasileira, including eye-catchingly fleshy takes on Scott Fitzgerald and D. H. Lawrence, and a deeply sinister Graham Greene.











He also worked for several other South American publishing houses.









In the 1960s he went to the US to work for 'Playboy' magazine, producing some uniquely odd photographs...



..before working in Spain and then returning to Brazil in the 1970s. He died in 2001.

So how did I get onto this? Well, one of Hirsch's covers was for Farmer's Flesh, as noted above.



I was thinking about that book because of a wonderful feature over here: The Box of Paperbacks Book Club. The idea is simple--a man bought a big box of cheapo paperbacks from a second-hand bookshop, and decided to read and post about each one, no matter what they were or how well they were written. The range of titles is as pleasingly eccentric as you might hope: everything from the James Bond novels to Flesh to The Man From Planet X #1: The She-Beast to Avengers spin-off novels.

In rough chronological order, here are some of the many Flesh covers, various (mostly antlery) interpretations of its futuristic pagan/sex/orgy madness (I'm not sure you'd call it a good book, but it's certainly memorable).








And then there's the currently in-print version, as part of this collection published by Baen.



From hideous type treatment to Martian Mills & Boon artwork, that last cover is a mess. It is very representative of Baen's fine tradition of ludicrous, boob-tastic, and typographically woeful cover artwork.








The Cold Equations, of the first cover above, is story where a young girl stowaway must be ejected from a spaceship because the fuel aboard is only enough for the planned pilot to reach safety. It has absolutely nothing to do with women in bikinis roaming the snow with mutant sabre-toothed tigers as company.

Some links:
* More on Eugênio Hirsch, as well as the rest of his mental 'Playboy' photos, at Weird Universe
* A brief thesis on the graphic design of Civilização Brasileira (PDF format) at book designer Ana Sofia Mariz's website
* More on the awfulness of Baen covers at Judge a Book by its Cover