Vintage Versions [Part 2]

And after yesterday's spectrum of Vintages, here's a different approach, coming out in March 2012. For this set of 7 books from the Vintage Classics backlist, the publisher has worked together with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as part of the museum's ‘British Design 1948 – 2012: Innovation in the Modern Age’ exhibition.

Vintage have hired seven different well-known designers to do covers for the series. I've been able to get hold of six of them.Missing is John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, with a cover design by milliner Philip Treacy.

Dodie Smith cover by textile designer Celia Birtwell

The only real dud in this lot, designed by Saatchi & Saatchi: it looks a bit as though it took 5 seconds to come up with, and 5 minutes to execute

Ian McEwen design by Wilkinson Eyre Architects

Iris Murdoch cover by fashion designer Zandra Rhodes

Graham Greene design by interior/textile designer Sue Timney

Mark Haddon design by Michael Horsham of Tomato

I would be surprised if this series wasn't at least partly inspired by the Penguin Decades series from last year: Zandra Rhodes was involved in that as well. Oddly enough, her Murdoch design is a somewhat frantic remix of the current cover by Jo Walker.

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

Grandfield on Greene

Bristolian noir-enthusiast Geoff Grandfield is a talented artist whose illustrations have appeared here before, on the Folio edition of Joe Simpson's Touching the Void.

His woodcut-like illustrations, using angular shapes, fields of flat colour and dramatic shadows, decorate the Penguin Classics US editions of many of Graham Greene's books (or at least those not decorated by Brian Cronin).











He has also done similar covers for the Folio Society editions of Greene's novels.






What's more, he has provided numerous black and white interior illustrations for these Folio books, a sprinkling of which are shown here. I love them: they capture the murky, dangerous, noir-ish world of the "entertainments" (Greene's own description for his more thriller-y novels) beautifully. (Click for bigger versions.)




















Next: more Grandfield work, this time for Raymond Chandler.