Vintage Versions [Part 2]

And after yesterday's spectrum of Vintages, here's a different approach, coming out in March 2012. For this set of 7 books from the Vintage Classics backlist, the publisher has worked together with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as part of the museum's ‘British Design 1948 – 2012: Innovation in the Modern Age’ exhibition.

Vintage have hired seven different well-known designers to do covers for the series. I've been able to get hold of six of them.Missing is John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, with a cover design by milliner Philip Treacy.

Dodie Smith cover by textile designer Celia Birtwell

The only real dud in this lot, designed by Saatchi & Saatchi: it looks a bit as though it took 5 seconds to come up with, and 5 minutes to execute

Ian McEwen design by Wilkinson Eyre Architects

Iris Murdoch cover by fashion designer Zandra Rhodes

Graham Greene design by interior/textile designer Sue Timney

Mark Haddon design by Michael Horsham of Tomato

I would be surprised if this series wasn't at least partly inspired by the Penguin Decades series from last year: Zandra Rhodes was involved in that as well. Oddly enough, her Murdoch design is a somewhat frantic remix of the current cover by Jo Walker.

Connections

A recent book which I've ordered and am impatiently awaiting is Craig Brown's One on One. It's one of those simple ideas that nobody had ever come up with until now: a collection of 101 true stories of often unlikely meetings, where each meeting leads on to the next (thus Adolf Hitler is almost killed when John Scott-Ellis hits him with his car in 1931; Scott-Eliis also met Rudyard Kipling; Kipling met Mark Twain, who had an odd encounter with Helen Keller, and so on, looping all the way round to Hitler again at the end). And just for the hell of it, each encounter is described in 1001 words.

How to create a cover for such a complex cast of characters? Well, why not put them all on it, with their connections?

Click to make readable

Very nice indeed. I don't know who to credit, though, since there is no designer listed on the scan of the dustjacket which I've been able to get hold of. The design is by Jo Walker.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

A Void is the English translation of Georges Perec's bizarre La Disparition, a 280-page novel that has not a single occurrence of the letter 'e'.

Perec (1936-1982), a member of the Oulipo group who wrote using various formal restraints on their books' structures, seems to have begun this book on a dare, and then thoroughly enjoyed its creation. It's a kind of mystery novel about a man who wakes up with a fundamental sense of wrongness: he's one of the few who notices that 'e' seems to have vanished from the universe. When he himself vanishes soon afterwards, his friends try to track him down, using the various strange documents he has left behind. Along the way they encounter clever 'e'-less remixes of various great works of literature, including Moby Dick, Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' soliloquoy, Shelley's Ozymandias, and Poe's The Raven.

The English translation from the French was done by Gilbert Adair. Aside from Love and Death on Long Island, I've found Adair's own novels deeply unsatisfying. They take intriguing ideas and ruin them with characters who have all the psychological realism of a Shakespeare play performed by kindergarten students. This translation, though, must count as a masterpiece. After all, it was probably even harder to write than the original novel: Perec, at least, could take the story where he liked, whereas Adair was stuck with the very narrow aparameters of converting one specific text from one language to another without ever using the letter 'e'.

The new Vintage Classics edition of A Void also has a clever cover, by Jo Walker. Aside from the publisher/author names in the top corner, it consists only of the letter 'e'.



This cunning use of negative space is quite uncommon, and all the more effective for it.

Something in the Sea?

To be honest, Iris Murdoch is not a writer I rate very highly. She has a great reputation as a thinker and philosopher, and that's probably fair enough. As a novelist, however, she has severe failings. This is not something you'd necessarily know from the near-sanctification of her that has taken place over the past few years, spearheaded by her husband's various memoirs.

One of these was turned into Iris the movie, which I enjoyed (with all its steely Judi Dench-ness and rampant Kate Winslet nudity), but which also hid the fact that, despite all their claims to great love, Murdoch and her hsuband were both rampantly unfaithful, and tended to use the third parties they were bonking to attack one another psychologically.

Looking at her vast back catalogue, and the number of them which have fallen out of print, I would have suspected that Murdoch does not in fact still sell very well. However, a 2004 story in The Guardian noted that her Booker Prize winner from 1978, The Sea, The Sea, sells some 7600 copies a year. And fair enough: if people want clunky characters, unrealistic dialogue and shoehorned-in philosophy then she's your writer of choice.

The point of this little rant, though, is to draw attention to the new Vintage Classics edition of The Sea, The Sea, which has a really lovely cover (designer unknown to me, as I've lost the bit of paper I wrote it down on in the bookshop). [UPDATE: I find that the designer is actually Jo Walker, who also did the Perec cover discussed above!]



I didn't even notice the sinister tentacle the first time I looked at this, but it's very clever. I also like the three-dimensional, layered-paper effect on this cover (though I suspect that effect was computer-generated with drop shadows rather than photographic, it still works well). It has a somewhat Japanese feel, like a wave-painting by Katsushika Hokusai crossed with the complex layered-paper work of Masayuki Miyata.

To see what I mean, here's Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, and an illustration Masayuki did for The Tale of Genji.




By the way, the title of this post came from a thriller I read recently by Yves Bonavero. It's no masterpiece, but it's a lot of murky fun.