Mistah Kurtz

Holy cats! This is how you do it: Mike "Hellboy" Mignola covers Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for Penguin Graphic Classics, under the aegis of Paul Buckley.

Coming in September, which seems a long, long way away.

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.

Francis Mosley & Folio

Suspicions arise within me that various imminent religious holidays, pagan celebrations and both spousal and own birthdays will interfere with the regularity of posting here over the next couple of weeks. Before any potential absence, though (not that any of this is planned ahead: as with much in life, I'm winging it), cop an eyeful of some other lovely Folio Society books and their illustrations, all designed and drawn by Francis Mosley.

Here's the cover and some of the interior art for a collection of the great M. R. James' ghost stories.








Afficionados of James' work will recognise at once which stories some of these illustrate.

Mosley has also had the distinction of designing and illustrating all of Folio's Joseph Conrad books, a beautiful set of deep blue volumes with bold, text-free front covers. Click for bigger versions.






And here are a few of the interior illustrations, taken from (in order), The Secret Agent (one of my favourite books ever), The Mirror of the Sea (one of Conrad's autobiographies), and Heart of Darkness.





From Conrad to Conan Doyle: Mosley designed and illustrated Folio's Sherlock Holmes set (shown here with an illustration from The Valley of Fear).




And then there's his design on The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell, part of his amazing trilogy about the collapse of the British Empire.






And we'll finish this look at his Folio work with a glimpse of The Shooting Party, Anton Chekhov's only full-length novel, which is also a cunning murder mystery whose central conceit was later stolen by Agatha Christie for what might otherwise have been her most original, and least annoying, novel.




Mister Mosley has done a lot of other book design, as well as writing and illustrating a number of his own children's books.


Basically, he's ace.

* * *

Now, before I wander off in search of Christmas booze (ah, sweet booze), a quick reminder to those of you in Australia who haven't yet bought all of your Christmas presents. You will, of course, be buying books. You will not, I hope, be buying them at Borders. If tempted to do that, look at the price tag. You'll find that, specials aside, the price of all their normal book stock is at least 10% higher than the Australian recommended retail price (an example: Cormac McCarthy's imminently filmed The Road sells elsewhere for $22.95, while at Borders it's yours for $25.50--bargain!).

Edward Gorey Bonanza Part 1

A long time ago I displayed the lovely Edward Gorey cover for H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, reprinted by NYRB Classics. They have also just released the version of Rex Warner's Men and Gods which Gorey illustrated.




This seems as good an excuse as any to have a look at some of Gorey's other covers. He did a lot, including those for his own books, which we'll look at in a few days. The most comprehensive list of books he worked on that I can find is here: those in the various Gorey books I own are sadly incomplete.

In fact, Gorey began his career as an illustrator by doing book covers. He did a lot for classics reprinted by Anchor/Doubleday in the 1950s. Here are a selection: some of these aren't the best-quality images, I'm afraid, but they are the best I could locate.















He also did covers for John Buchan's The 39 Steps...



..Bram Stoker's Dracula...



..Thomas Wolfe's The Web and the Rock...



..T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats...



..Edward Lear's The Dong with a Luminous Nose...



..and Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales...



..as well as this collection of Victorian supernatural novels.



Startlingly, this is only a fraction of the books he covered. Next time we'll look at a few of the (many) anthologies he designed jackets for.