The New Book from Pan Macmillan That Copied the Slightly Older Book From Hesperus

Let's start the new year with a copycat cover.

Major publishing companies pass on a quirky title about a misbehaving old man translated from the Swedish, but it turns out to be a surprise hit for the admirable Hesperus Press:

Major publishing company (Pan Macmillan) quickly decides they want some of that lovely cash, buys rights to another quirky title about a growing old disgracefully, translated from the Swedish, copies cover of hit Hesperus book.

To be fair, purple and blue are different colours.

Magic and Patter

One of the books I've most enjoyed recently was Hesperus Press's compilation of the writings of Harry Houdini.

In seeking out more books by the great magician and rationalist hoax-exposer, I came across a number of funky old books intended to draw back the veil and expose the craft to the general public. First, the Houdinis...

 ..and then some others.

Do children these days still want to learn magic tricks? I really wanted to when I was a child, but then back then we were also impressed by chroma key special effects. These days, who needs a magic slate when you can buy an iPad? In the old days, even hard-bitten soldiers wanted to learn magic tricks.

Probably the best modern use of vintage magical iconography on a book cover is the design by GTC Art & Design for the cover of Glen David Gold's novel, Carter Beats the Devil...

..Gold having written the introduction to this fine comic biography of Houdini, which has a great cover image (though less intrusive text in the white space would have worked better)...

..and, finally, there's this non-comic Houdini biography, which also has a great cover image (shame about the red update circle/sticker/blot).

Hesperus Brief Histories

Four books due out from Hesperus in the middle of the year (which probably means we'll see them some time in 2012, given Hesperus's recent track record*) are their Brief Histories of various forms of literature. Every cover is made up of a shelf of relevant books, but every book is both a fake and a pun (and there's a nice range of fake publishing imprints in there, too).

Among Hesperus's other allegedly forthcoming titles, I especially like this cover.

* I have about a dozen Hesperus titles on order, most of them scheduled to have come out in late 2008 or during 2009, and none of them yet to see print. They do great books, but you do have to wait a bit to read them.

Quickie Follow-Up

Two brief things. First of all, in answer to my query about whether Hesperus Press still exists, I'm told by one who works there that "We are still very much in business – our website is currently being redesigned and will be launched very soon."

Secondly, when I posted a whole bunch of peculiar covers with gorillas on them, I neglected to include Six-Gun Gorilla, rediscovered by Jess Nevins, and described by him like this: "the Six-Gun Gorilla appeared in Adventure and Wizard in 1926 (I think). I do not know who created him. O'Neil was an actual gorilla, who had been trapped as a baby, brought to the States, and sold to Johnson, a Colorado prospector. Johnson, a kind man, treated O'Neil very well. He also taught O'Neil how to dig, fetch firewood, haul up buckets of water, cook, clean, and (oh dear) load and fire a revolver. Naturally, when Johnson is murdered for what he knows about "the great motherlode," O'Neil ooks revenge. He straps on a bandolier and two six-shooters and begins tracking the thieves across a hundred miles of Colorado mountains and badlands. He picks them off one by one, meanwhile discovering a talent for holding up stagecoaches and using them to chase fleeing gunmen."

Rejoice in the majesty of O'Neil.

Spines on a Cover, and a Query

It's a book I'm unlikely to read because of various literary and political prejudices, but the cover of Patrick Hennessey's The Junior Officers' Reading Club is appealing. (Though I think actual little plastic soldiers, rather than digitally added little real soldiers, would have looked a bit better.)



As a book from Penguin/Allen Lane, they've slipped in quite a few Penguin spines in that lot.

On another note, does anyone in Britain know whether the publisher Hesperus Press still exists? Their website is "being updated", their blog hasn't been touched since April, their various social network sites are gathering dust, and all of the books they were going to publish over the last few months, including this one discussed earlier, remain unavailable.



This, by the way, is obviously not one of those promised "more substantial posts" I was on about last time.

Pomegranates Everywhere

Here's another duplicated cover image: the photo is 'Pomegranates' by Takashi Shima (about whom I cannot find anything more online, other than the fact that they share a name with an actor in a Godzilla sequel), and it first showed up on Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World by Lilia Zaouali.



This is a book which I gave my foodie wife, and which caused her mother to cry in alarm, "You're not going to become a Muslim, are you?"

It's also shortly to be the cover of this Hesperus classic, Vladimir Odoevsky's Two Princesses.



What's that you say? Get a life? I don't know what you're talking about.

UPDATE: It's on a third cover...

Near Enough

I quote that fount of uncontested truth, Wikipedia, when I say "the Kalahari Bushmen, San, Sho, Basarwa, Kung, or Khwe are indigenous people of southern Africa that spans most areas of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia, and Angola."

You'll notice that list of countries does not include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which used to be the Belgian Congo, the setting for Joseph Conrad's famous Heart of Darkness.

So it's odd that two different publishers (Hesperus and Oneworld) should decide to use Kalahari Bushmen on their Heart of Darkness covers.




These are the original photos, both of men in traditional head-dresses, and both by Art Wolfe, whose website is chock-full of amazing photographs.




And here they are with the covers, just for the hell of it.




It's a bit of a shame that two publishers who do a lot to bring much great world literature into English seem to have plumped for an any-old-African-will-do approach for their covers.

London's Scarlet Plague

Adventurer, gold-hunter, sailor, writer and incompetent suicide, Jack London is one of those writers (like Kipling) better-known for the non-science-fiction work, but who still produced several classics of the genre.

He wrote an early "superhero" story, 'The Shadow and the Flash'; a time-travel/prehistoric-man novella, Before Adam; a political dystopia, The Scarlet Heel; and a number of other SF short stories. Importantly, for the purposes of this site's obsession with end-of-the-world stories, he also wrote The Scarlet Plague.

Here's the first book edition, from Macmillan in 1916 (it was originally published in the London Magazine).


Here's the edition I have, from 1946.


Here are a few other versions: a dullish version with a London portrait on the front, a pulp magazine reprint from 1949, and a Dodo Press cheapo print-on-demand version.



The Scarlet Plague is set in 2072, some six decades after a disease outbreak which killed almost everybody on the planet. One of the few survivors, now near death, tries to pass on some of his pre-disaster knowledge to his grandchildren. He reminisces about the time of the plague, recalling the rioting, the social collapse, the fleeing from the cities, the murder--all the staples of a good apocalyptic tale. Despite the pulp magazine cover above, there are no women in golden metal bikinis. You can read the whole thing online here, and also see the original illustrations by Gordon Grant, one of which is at the top of this post.

One of the nicest covers for this book I have seen is that on the new Hesperus edition. I have no idea what this image is, but it conjures associations of blood and broken bone without actually being in any way grisly.



Finally, for your benefit, here are a few more of those Gordon Grant illustrations. Click for bigger versions.



UPDATE: Katya from Hesperus Press has kindly informed me (see the comments) that the image for their edition of The Scarlet Plague was a specially commissioned photo from Jill Auville. You kind more of Jill's work here and here, and it's well worth taking a look--beautiful stuff.