Posh Fan Fiction

Julian Barnes once described literary prizes like the Booker as being "posh bingo". I can only think that the depressing trend of commissioning literary novelists to write new books about established characters is basically posh fan fiction. Everyone involved ought to have better things to do.

Having said that, the cover to John Banville's Chandler cover version is pretty damn nice. It's by Jonathan Pelham.

Vintage Bond II

Sorry for the break--illness of a particularly irritating and boring kind has got in the way. But in the meantime the rest of the upcoming Vintage Classics UK James Bond covers have emerged. I'm still not convinced, but I must admit they're growing on me. Here's the complete set.

Some, like Thunderball and The Spy Who Loved Me, seem just right, while I feel as though others aren't quite there yet. What do you think?

Vintage Bond

In September, Vintage Classics UK take over the rights to, and publish their own versions of, Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, which have been licensed to Penguin for the last decade or so. A couple of the covers have been released so far...

..and, while I quite like them (they seem to take their cue from Michael Salu's Italo Calvino covers), they don't seem quite dynamic enough for the books. Compare them with some of Penguin's many editions from the last 10 years...

More on these editions, released in both hardback and paperback, here and here

The appropriately lurid Penguin US covers

The Penguin Modern Classics editions

A Penguin 'Red Classics' omnibus containing Live and Let Die

The first Penguins from 2002, also made available in hardback and paperback

This also shows just how much Penguin has milked the Bond books--6 or 7 editions versions of the series in a decade (plus a few special editions of individual books in the series). You can't say they didn't do their best to make their money's worth. Vintage seem to be aiming for a more "literary" look; whether that will tap a new market of readers, I don't know.

Peter Blake's 1950s Penguins

In another of Penguin's apparently never-ending anniversary celebrations, the UK arm is releasing the Penguin Decades in April: "Five seminal novels from each decade from the 1950s to 1980s inclusive, with cover artwork by high-profile artists and designers." Given that this is for their 75th anniversary, the number of books and the timespan seems fairly arbitrary, but that doesn't really matter.

As far as I can tell, each the covers of the books for each decade will be era-appropriate. To this end, they've commissioned famous pop artist Peter Blake to do the covers for the 1950s books (Scenes from Provincial Life by William Cooper, Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis,  From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming, Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse, and Memento Mori by Muriel Spark). I've found all the covers but the Waterhouse, so here they are.

 

 

 

Whatever Billy Liar ends up looking like, it is about time it had a facelift. The current Penguin edition (and the copy I have) is incredibly '80s-looking...

 

..though I am partial to these two older Penguin editions...

 

I'll put up the covers to the other decades as I get hold of them.

Ink on the Skin

[Note: I have been asked by Penguin US to remove two of these covers, which I have done, as the images I was displaying were far from the finished work. Sorry for jumping the gun! I hope to be able to show them closer to the books' publication dates.]

In August I posted the first two covers for the forthcoming Penguin Ink series, which Penguin US is putting out in June next year as part of their 75th anniversary celebrations (Penguin is milking these Big Number anniversaries a lot recently--it's the 60th or 70th or 75th anniversary of one arm of the company somewhere in the world all the time these days, it seems).

Now I've managed to get the other four covers from the series (though one is incomplete). As well as Coetzee and Foster Wallace (see that first post), we have...

[Removed because not final image]

..Ian Fleming, cover by Chris Garver ...

..Martin Amis, cover by Bert Krak (click for bigger)...

..Helen Fielding, cover by poster artist Tara McPherson...

 [Removed because not final image]

..and Keri Hulme, with an appropriately Maori-inspired cover by NZ-based Pepa Heller.

These covers were commissioned by the great Paul Buckley, a VP Executive Creative Director at Penguin US. The Money cover was stolen from his flickr page. Buckley has also been busy producing another of those beautiful volumes which commemorate Penguin's design history. This one, Penguin 75, looks at 75 covers, with commentary from those involved in their creation. Due out at the same time as the Penguin Ink books, it has no cover yet, but here's one of the internal page spreads (click for a bigger look).

Finally, here are the covers of the two collections of work by Tara McPherson, most of which is distinctly more disquieting than her Bridget Jones cover.

 

Blogger Eats Hat Regarding Golden Buttocks

I recently made fun of a cover for a James Bond novel put out in the 1990s by MJF Books. A number of commenters said they actually rather liked it, and I have to admit it's grown on me too.



This is especially the case now that I've found more of the covers in the series. Yes, they're cartoonish and a bit daft, but then, let's be honest, so are the books.





UPDATE: The art director for MJF has kindly commented to let us know that "the jacket series was designed by Rich Rossiter, and the illustrations were done by Christoph Blumrich."

For 'No Shame', see under 'HarperCollins' (plus Gleaming Buttocks)

If you've been in a bookshop in the last couple of years, you've seen what a raging success Stephanie Meyer's various Twilight books have become. The books are published by an imprint of Little, Brown.



Lo, HarperCollins did look upon these works, and want a piece of the financial action. So what have they done? Committed aesthetic violence upon a public-domain novel beloved by the characters in the Twilight books, giving it a cheap and nasty copycat cover, and sent it forth to rake in the cash.



UPDATE: How do our friends at Tutis choose to cover Wuthering Heights? Like this, of course.



Yours for around US$17. Or you could lash out on the US$20 BiblioBazaar edition, which features the bicycle Heathcliff used on his trips through the moors...

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And here's something completely different: an amusingly daft cover for Goldfinger, as published by MJF Books in 1997.