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.

Book about Book-Burning Burnished with 36 Books, and an Oft-Banned Book

A novel due out in February, set in Franco's Spain, about book-burning, boxing and friendship, with a cover made up of 36 books:

And from the same publisher, Harvill Secker, and due out two months later, yet another Orwell face-lift, this time for a hardcover edition of Animal Farm.

Designers both unknown. The designer of the Rivas book is Michael Salu.

* * *

UPDATE: Regarding Pohl's The Age of the Pussyfoot, featured in this post, I find I have this scan of the main illustration from its first magazine appearance. The art is by comics legend Wally Wood. Click for a bigger version.

Forthcoming, both Good and Bad

A quick survey of some upcoming cover designs...

First, a couple of Orwells. Penguin like to repackage Orwell at regular intervals, and the 60th anniversary of the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four is excuse enough. I'm not complaining, though: the cover for the edition due in June looks like this:



I hope they don't decide to slap on the title and author at the last minute. Also due at around the same time is the latest repackaging of Orwell's complete novels...



..a collection which holds a particular place in my esteem as it was an earlier (and uglier) edition of this book which was the first thing I ever bought with money I earned through writing.

Later in 2009 Penguin Classics are also republishing some of the best books by Walter Tevis and Eric Ambler, both of whom I like a lot. One of the Tevises makes effective use of a film still...



..while the Amblers have nicely evocative cover photos.




Ambler's rights must have come up for grabs recently, as the books Penguin didn't acquire seem to have gone to House of Stratus, much mentioned round these parts recently. These Stratus Amblers rejoice in some of the ugliest, most hideously slapped-together covers I've seen in a long time.





That last one says "Bring me some paracetamol!" rather than "Thrilling spy shenanigans!". I can't imagine anyone wanting to pick up these books based on the cover designs. ("Wow, some badly Photoshopped ghostly boots on holiday! A must-read!")

The Covers of Ralph Steadman

A few posts ago I showed an old Penguin with a Ralph Steadman cover. This got me thinking, and I've tried to track down as many other Steadman covers as I can. Like most people, I first encountered his frenetic, savage cartoons in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and it's this collaboration for which he is probably best known.





But Steadman has been productive for a long time. Born in 1936 and brought up in Wales, he now lives in Kent and is still, fortunately, going strong. He has written and illustrated a number of books on his own (some for children and some, including several on booze, rather less so)...

















..and for someone whose work can be very politically savage, he is a natural fit with both George Orwell and Ambrose Bierce, as well as the more fuzzy rantings of Will Self and the dark children's books of Roald Dahl.






He has also illustrated an edition of Alice in Wonderland...



..a children's novel about a bushranger by the great Australian writer Randolph Stow (few non-Australians realise just how central the bushrangers, like Ned Kelly, Captains Moonlite, Starlight and Thunderbolt, Ben Hall, etc, are to my country's self-image)...



..and the dementedly (and unintentionally) funny juvenilia-novellas of Daisy Ashford.



(By the way, if you're a fan of Ashford, the Internet Archive has a fine collection of her work as scanned PDFs here.)

Then we have demented comedy of a different kind, with Flann O'Brien:



Here are the Penguin covers I could find that he provided.








And finally, two oddments: a political cartooning history, and a cover for Poetry magazine.



UPDATE: Commenter Kevin Arthur pointed me towards this other Steadman cover for a Walter Benjamin essay collection...



..which also gives me another excuse to re-post this cover, from the new series of Penguin Great Ideas; this witty cover being a David Pearson job.