Bad Stock Luck

Some authors don't seem to have a lot of luck when it comes to originality in their cover designs. One such is Deborah Lawrenson (who I've never read). When her The Art of Falling was republished in 2005, it ended up with a tinted version (with added castle and bombers) of a cover image used on a Penguin Classic of an excellent H. E. Bates book the previous year.




The same thing happened to this book's original cover: the same image as appeared on it (again with bombers added) has also been spotted on the cover of Thomas Cahill's Mysteries of the Middle Ages.




Then there's her most recent book, Songs of Blue and Gold, which has the same cover as the German edition of a novel by Stephanie Gertler.

Style and Restraint with the New English Library

When I recently discussed the latest Capuchin Classics, I talked about H. E. Bates and his stories.



My latest second-hand Bates acquisition is A Crown of Wild Myrtle, in an old New English Library paperback from 1968.


Looking at this, you might be inclined to think it would be no good. That's because NEL were masters at wrapping books in lurid, unattractive covers, no matter the contents. This was one of their more restrained efforts. At this point I suspect you're hoping for some of their less restrained efforts, and as always I aim to please.



















They got a lot of mileage from Hitler, Satan, murderers, the counter-culture and sex scandals, as you can see. The last book shown above, Michael Fisher's The Captives, is actually not bad, though very odd: it's about a scientist who locks up two men and a woman as part of an experiment in sociology, sexuality and skin-grafting, and things go predictably awry. My copy is the original Constable hardback, the cover of which has its own charm.



(Many of these images borrowed with thanks from Alwyn Turner and his sadly frozen-in-time Trash Fiction.)

Capuchins Continued

Experienced illustrator Angela Landels has been at it again, providing the covers to the next batch of Capuchin Classics. I wrote about the first lot earlier, saying that they reminded me favourably of the first illustrated Penguin paperbacks.

At the time, one of Capuchin's staff wrote to me to let me know that, if I looked out for the 2009 books as the covers became available, I would see some (restrained) sauciness. They were not wrong!



Looking at their other forthcoming books, I am much intrigued: they pretty much all look like things I want to read. That they are including an H. E. Bates story collection is highly commendable, what with Bates being a brilliant writer at novella/short story length. He's one of those guys who everybody reads while they (the writer, not the reader) are alive, but then vanish into a black hole of neglect when they die. Only a few of his literally BILLIONS of books are now in print, but his previous ubiquity does at least mean that almost every second-hand bookshop in the known universe contains at least a few of his story collections. If you know what's good for you, you will read one of them and see what I'm talking about.



Other promising Capuchins to come include:





The Vercors book I'd never heard of, but listen to this blurb: Very early one morning a doctor is called out to attend the corpse of a newborn baby who has been killed, the father freely admits, by a shot of strychnine chlorhydrate which he himself has administered. The police are called, but where is the mother? ‘She was taken back to the Zoo yesterday.’ ‘The Zoo? Does she work there?’ ‘No, she lives there … The mother is not a woman, properly speaking. She is a female of the species Paranthropus erectus.’ That sounds like my cup of demented tea, and the restrained cover doesn't hurt, either.