Small Publisher Specials #2: New Vessel Press

New Vessel Press is a small publisher that started up just three years ago, devoted entirely to literature in translation into English. How they make it work financially I have no idea, but it doesn't hurt that they seem to publish uniformly excellent books (I've read around half of their output so far, and there hasn't been a dud amongst them). A particular highlight has been their republication of two wonderfully grim (but funny) novels by Marek Hlasko, a Polish-born, sometimes-Israeli-settled writer who died at the age of 35 from living the sort of life he wrote about so well.

All of New Vessel's covers so far are the work of talented designer and comics creator Liana Finck, They almost all use very limited colour palettes to great effect, and not one of them has any type that isn't hand-drawn anywhere on them.

I just got and started reading this yesterday: fascinating so far--a weird mix of sun-bleached nostalgia, family politics, sexual frustration and depravity

Finck's own experiences in the comics world can probably be summarised by this cartoon she created (click to make legible)...

..since, far from superheroes, her biggest comics work to date is A Bintel Brief, an anthology of true stories adapted from the 100+-year-old advice columns of New York's old Yiddish-language The Forward newspaper. You can read several extracts from the book at her site, here.

Small Publisher Specials #1: Readux

Being the first in a series of posts focusing on the splendid work of small publishers in this small-publisher-unfiendly age.

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Readux is a small publisher in both senses of the word--they are a small Berlin-based outfit, but they also publish small (32, 48 or 64-page) books: novellas, short stories and essays, either in the original English or else translated from Swedish or German. These are not little stapled booklets, either: they're proper, perfect-bound books.

Usually published in batches of four, three times a year, each Readux series has a specific look, unified by the overall design of Susann Stefanizen.

Series 1 makes use of surrealistic illustrations by André Gottschalk, full of flat colour and strange elements.

Series 2, all Stefanizen's work, are more abstract, with coloured polygons on textured backdrops.

The most recent series, #3, uses delicate pencil sketches by Lisa Schweizer against worn paper backgrounds.

And then there's the imminent series 4, all eye-warping patterns and neon colours, designed by André Gottschalk and Susanne Stahl, based on their 'See Before Reading' system...

Returning to Susann Stefanizen, here are her beautifully simple geometrical designs for a series of German-published books on music...

Never Any End to Hemingway

The newest English translation of Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas's work is Never Any End to Paris, his thoroughly enjoyable and funny story of a Hemingway-obsessed young Spaniard trying to be a writer in 1970s Paris, with Marguerite Duras, of all people, as his landlady. Published by Harvill Secker, the cover illustration of the pretentious narrator and his hero at a cafe table is by Jörn Kaspuhl... 
 

..and it rather cleverly plays off the original dustjacket for Hemingway's own A Farewell to Arms. 

 

Some of Kaspuhl's more unsettling illustrations, which are derived from casual photos and show people turning into strange cross-species hybrids, were collected in his now sadly out-of-print Humanimal.