Matt Taylor's Le Carre's Update (plus Pelham and Wolpe for walls)

In May I raved about Matt Taylor's wonderful John Le Carre covers for Penguin US. He's produced one more, for January's republication of the classic The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

And here's the un-texted illustration.

Also! Heroes of this blog David Pelham and Berthold Wolpe have some of their celebrated cover designs for Penguin and Faber respectively available as fancy art prints here. If you have any wall space not obscured by jammed bookshelves, how about filling it with some book covers?

Here are the designs: Wolpe's famous text-based covers for Faber, and Pelham's famous A Clockwork Orange and J. G. Ballard covers.

Eye

What did cover designers do with London-set books before the London Eye was built? Before that, it seems London didn't have a skyline identifiable to book-buyers. Now the Eye itself is becoming shorthand for central London.

 

  

  

  

  

  

 

The Baxter and Scarrow books, by the way, are recent additions to the end-of-the-world library. The former posits sea levels that keep rising and rising and rising, while the latter is a very good end-of-peak-oil novel somewhat hobbled by an unnecessary and somewhat daft vast-international-conspiracy subplot

This is completely unconnected, but interesting... the design of a commercial book cover, condensed into just under 2 minutes, by Lauren Panepinto.

15 Perennials

I recently bought a couple of novels with rather nice covers: Ballard's Empire of the Sun and Susan Fletcher's Eve Green.


They're excellent examples of the effectiveness of black-and-white illustration, in each case highlighted with a patch of metallic ink.

What I didn't know until I got the books and looked at the back is that they're part of a series of 15 reissues by Harper Perennial UK, all with covers by Petra Borner. What's more the 15 covers, when placed side-by-side, create one large illustration. You'll need to click for a proper look.


This is a great idea, and a good way to unify a series that otherwise seems fairly arbitrary in terms of the books included.

Here are the spines, showing the metallic inks to better effect.

Petra Borner has done a number of other lovely book covers, shown at her portfolio linked to above. I can't display them all here, but I couldn't resist those she did for the recent Penguin Poets series. Again, click for a bigger version.

Ballardian

J. G. Ballard is one of the greats, a science-fiction writer who has achieved mainstream success (to the point where critics now pretend he never wrote SF at all), and whose worldview and style are consistent and quite recognisable. Wrecked vehicles, drained swimming pools, creeping sand, designer clothes, spilled blood: these are common elements throughout his work. He's also someone who has been unusually well served by cover artists over the years.

His recent novels have seemed stuck in a rut, repeating the same plot (someone, usually a doctor, moves into an expensive enclave, and gets involved with the rich psychopaths who live there). Look to his earlier work, though, and you'll find some ferocious, bleakly intelligent stuff. We'll look at two of them here as part of the End of the World project.

The Drowned World (1962) and The Drought (1964, and also known as The Burning World) were Ballard's second and third books--he has disowned his first, The Wind from Nowhere.

Here are the covers to these two books, from the 1974 Penguin reissues designed by David Pelham, most famous for his cover to A Clockwork Orange.



The Drowned World is an early global warming novel. Increased solar radiation has made the equator too hot to live in, and turned the rest of the globe into a lushly tropical nightmare, sinking into the rising seas. What's left of civilisation has fled for the melting poles. A few loners and eccentrics remain behind in London, using research work or military action as an excuse to stay, their behaviour slowly turning reptilian to cope with their changed environment. Slow-moving but very involving, it ends with a hallucinatory journey towards the boiling equator in search of a missing man. The Pelham cover above could only be improved by the use of a London rather than a New York landmark.

The Drought goes to the opposite extreme, positing a world deprived of fresh water, and following one man and his disintegrating family through their struggles to survive. Both books have a certain clinical--perhaps sociopathic--detachment from their characters. It's as though you're watching an extreme experiment that just happens to involve real human beings.

Here are the very different, but also effective, most recent editions, the current Harper Perennial versions.



Compare these with a couple of early US paperback covers.



And finally, here are a range of other covers, which you'll need to click on to view properly.


Here we have the recent Gollancz cover by Jim Burns (appropriately London-y), the original 1960s Gollancz hardback, a surrealist Penguin, and another Harper Perennial cover which was (I believe) never actually used.



And here we have the original Cape hardcover jacket, and three covers from various 1990s and 2000s editions published by the late, lamented Flamingo, who have since been dissolved into the HarperCollins empire.

For more on Ballard covers, and Ballard in general, visit the Ballardian.

UPDATE: Rick McGrath kindly sent more information: "Yes, Ballardian is great for comments about JGB's book covers, but to actually see the covers in question, you have to go to The Terminal Collection."